Jonathan Bernstein makes some good points here
about the proposal to extend suffrage to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in
Takoma Park, Maryland. He makes three main arguments in favour which I wanted
to touch upon here.
Firstly, he notes the oddity that teenagers
are allowed to participate in politics by campaigning, lobbying, or donating,
but not by voting or holding office. This is especially odd since voting is
significantly easier than most other forms of political participation.
Secondly, he makes the argument that since
all humans have interests, all humans should cast a vote. I agree with what he
is saying, but don’t follow his suggestion that parents could be given extra
votes to cast on behalf of their children. The idea of giving parents extra
votes would a) cause conflict when a parent has political views different from
those of their children; b) cause conflict between the parents as to who gets
to cast the vote; and c) orient political debate even more towards the wants of
families – every politician would sound like the 2007 campaign trail edition of
Kevin ‘Working Families’ Rudd.
(On a related note, if we want to safeguard
the political representation of geographical areas with high ratios of children
to adults, all we need to do is draw electoral boundaries on the basis of
population rather than voter registration. Australia uses the latter method,
while the United States’ use of the former is currently being challenged in the
courts in a case called Lepak v. City of
Irving.)
Thirdly, Bernstein makes the case that
voting will become a life-long habit if people can start younger. I’ve heard of
research which backs up this point – in Britain, people who were eighteen years
of age during a general election are more likely to continue voting for life
than those who are 22 or 23 (the most probable reason is that voting, as a
symbol of adulthood, is more precious to an 18yo still at school and living at
home than a 22yo living away from home, owning a car, etc.). Bernstein makes a
good point that if people begin voting while at university (which in the U.S.,
more so than in Australia, usually means living in a different place to where
they grew up) they will care less about the local issues than if they were
voting in their home town.
As for his suggestion of what age young
people should be allowed to vote, I don’t see the problem with 12 or 14. But in
the United States, where there is a clear distinction between general-purpose
local governments and school districts, perhaps we could start by lowering the
voting age to twelve for school board elections, and keep sixteen or eighteen
as the limit for other types of poll. At the ages of twelve through to sixteen,
most interaction that a person has with the state occurs through the education
system, and it might solve the problems which plague school board elections in
America – such as low turnout and the capturing of school districts by the
Religious Right and other special interests.
The objections to lowering the voting age
are easy to bat away. If teenagers don’t pay tax, don’t own property, or aren’t
fully educated, it shouldn’t matter, because in a modern democracy the suffrage
is no longer linked to taxation, property ownership, or education. And any
predictions of the partisan effects of lowering the voting age would no doubt
be proven wrong; recall that after the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment,
the Conventional Wisdom inside the Beltway was that the Youth Vote would defeat
Nixon in 1972 (he won it by similar margins as he did the other age brackets).
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