16- and 17-year olds should be able to vote.
They can in Argentina, Austria, Brazil,
Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, and Nicaragua. In some US states, those who will
be 18 by the time of the general election can vote in the primary at 17.
Elizabeth Warren has proposed a bill that would permit 17-year-olds to
pre-register so as to be ready to vote at 18. It would not take congressional
action to enfranchise those who are 16 and 17. Any state legislature could do
it for its citizens, subject to the state constitution.
The House of Representatives shall be composed
of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and
the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors
of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature. [Art 1, Sec 2, Cl 1]
The electors [for US Senate] in each State
shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous
branch of the State legislatures. [17th Amendment]
"The right of citizens of the United
States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age." [26th
Amendment]
No
state can set its enfranchisement age at 19, but any state can choose to let
16-year-olds vote. They should.
Immaturity
It
will be objected: They are just not old enough; have not the neurological, or
rational, or emotional, maturity. They don’t know enough about right and wrong
or about the political system or they haven’t had enough experience with the
real world. In short, their judgment is not sufficiently developed.
It
is true that the 16-year-old brain is still a work in progress, especially the 16-year
male brain. In particular, impulse control is not yet well developed. There are
neurological-behavioral reasons to keep young men through their lower 20s away
from motor vehicles and firearms, but not to keep them away from the voting
booth. The median 16-year-old would probably beat the median 50-year-old at
most standard tests of reasoning or civics.
“Yes,
but they have no knowledge of the real, nitty gritty, world, the world where
the dreams that you dream really don’t come true.” Put aside the underlying conservative
bias of the idea that youthful social vision will and should be extinguished by
the common sense that comes with life’s hard knocks. That the last couple of
years of high school are going to make any difference in the naïve idealism to
sober common sense ratio is a dubious presumption. If 16-year-olds lack real
world common sense, so do 18-year-olds.
Where
do the states stand with respect to other decisions important enough to require
developed judgment? You need to be 17 to get married in New York, Oregon, and
Nebraska, but in all other states marriage at 16 is possible. 30 states give
full drivers’ licenses to drivers younger than 18. In even more states the
under-18s can be owners of rifles.
16-year-olds
are undeniably “People” within the meaning of the Constitution, and assume for
now that we are talking only about citizens. Denying them the vote, then,
surely requires good reasons, better reasons than have been set out.
Sometimes
US states live up to the claim that they are laboratories of democracy,
although lately most might be more aptly described as laboratories of
anti-democracy. Let’s see Vermont or Wyoming lower the voting age to test
whether there will be some problem not encountered by Austria or Guernsey.
The Slippery Slope
“If
we let 16-year-olds vote, we cannot ignore that 15-year-olds are very similar
to 16s. But then there are the 14s, and, eventually, we will have to
enfranchise newborns! There is no rational stopping point.” Law inevitably requires the drawing of
arbitrary lines. 16 would have elements of arbitrariness as has 18 and had 21. We
would be no more required to work downward from 16 than we were to work
downward from 21. If a state enfranchises on the 15th birthday,
let’s see what its experience teaches us.
Partisan Manipulation
Isn’t
there a risk that partisan state legislators will set the minimum voting age so
as to maximize the advantage of the legislature’s majority party? Yes. There is
a good chance this will happen, and it will likely happen in a state in which
the party in question has its majority only because of gerrymandering and partisan
voting regulations. We have seen a lot of that in the last few years.
If
a party without the support of a majority of the voters of the state
consolidates its minority rule, that is bad, and may well be tragic. It is the
anti-democratic measures, however, that are the root of the evil. If enfranchising voters who really should
have the vote, as, I think, 16s and 17s, then the democratic rights of those 16s
and 17s take precedence. Minority rule should be addressed through measures
that correct what is anti-democratic, not what is pro-democratic even if it
benefits anti-democrats. Taking away the vote of those who should have it is a
political sin of the first magnitude. Giving the vote for bad reasons to those
who should have it is not a display of virtue, but it is the right thing.
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