16-year-olds should be able to vote.
For some, this might seem like a foregone conclusion. 16-year-olds are taxed and even tried in court as adults, some 16-year-olds are incredibly active in politics, and many teenagers are far more knowledgeable about current events than most adults.
For most of the population though, suffrage for 16-year-olds seems unnecessary. After all, 16-year-olds only have to wait a couple of years until they get to vote. Yes, 16-year-olds do participate in the labor force and do deserve a voice in the political process, but for those of us who have already passed the age of 18, two years seems like a trivial amount of time to wait. We all waited, and so can they.
However, the United States faces a crisis of voter disengagement. The 2020 election may have had the highest turnout rate of any election in the past century, but more than 80 million voting-eligible Americans still did not vote. In terms of voter registration, America lags behind almost all other developed democratic nations. Among those registered to vote, even fewer people follow politics closely, and political discussions are rarely productive and civil. Among communities of color, especially Black communities, voter suppression has been a fact of politics since the Jim Crow era.
Allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote would be a massive step toward fixing every single one of these problems. A voting age of 16, beginning in local communities, would revolutionize our political culture in the United States, politically empowering future generations of Americans and elevating our civil discourse.
The Proposal
Lowering the voting age to 16 should begin in local communities, giving young people access to the ballot box for the issues that matter the most to their daily lives. As a first foray into civic engagement, young people should begin by voting for school board members and other locally elected officials.
Some argue that 16-year-olds are not knowledgeable enough to participate in the political process, and it is true that they generally may be less knowledgeable about issues such as property taxes and Social Security. However, the largest budgetary costs for local governments are public welfare, elementary and secondary school education, higher education, hospitals, and transportation, all things that 16-year-olds have had direct experience with.
16-year-olds are incredibly knowledgeable about their local communities as they participate in community services like schools and libraries, regularly use public transit, and drive on local roads. They certainly make up for their lack of knowledge about the estate tax with their immediate experience with education and community spaces. Young people also understand schools much more than most people in their communities and are affected the most by changes to the schools.
Some also argue that young people could be subject to outsized influence from parents and teachers, but in local elections, this is probably not the case. Local elections are significantly less partisan and generally have far fewer participants than national elections, so they are much more “low stakes” than the presidential election. In many places around the country, local elections are entirely non-partisan, and candidates simply run on a platform. As a (possibly apocryphal) maxim commonly attributed to New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia goes, “There is no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage.” For young people who live in the same home as their parents and happen to have different political beliefs from them, voting in a local race is highly unlikely to cause major problems or lead to an environment that could be coercive. In many cases, lowering the voting age could lead to both young people and their parents learning more about the communities they live in, which would be fantastic for local community politics.
After voting at 16 is entrenched in local communities, other levels of government at the state and federal levels can consider the proposition to increase suffrage at those levels. Even if it takes a longer time for voting at 16 to be adopted at higher levels of government, the benefits of voting at 16 manifest at the local level for young people and their communities.
Lowering the voting age in local communities is the next wave of democratic reform in the United States, and it has already begun. Oakland, California; Berkeley, California; Hyattsville, Maryland; Greenbelt, Maryland; Riverdale, Maryland; and Takoma Park, Maryland have all instituted some measures for allowing 16-year-olds to vote in local elections or school board elections.
First Steps
18 is perhaps the most difficult year to begin voting.
Most teenagers turn 18 during their senior year of high school. This means that when Election Day arrives in November, many students are just settling into college life or working full time out of high school. Plenty of students miss their first opportunity to vote because they are away from home and the process to request an absentee ballot is a hassle to complete or information on how to vote is not readily available.
There are so many challenges to voting for the first time even without the added stress of living away from home for the first time. It can be difficult to register (especially if one does not have a driver’s license or documentation), to gain the requisite knowledge of how to cast a ballot, or even to figure out how to get to your polling place, since there are different procedures with different requirements in every state. And yet, voters who manage to make it through these challenges once have a much easier time doing it again. Voting becomes a “habit” as those who voted in the last election go on to vote in the next one.
Some voters are less well-equipped to overcome these challenges and form a voting habit than others. It takes longer for people who may not have support networks full of voters to become voters because the process is so challenging the first time. Lowering the voting age would level the playing field, allowing students to register to vote in a familiar environment, with the time and space they need, through institutions like schools and community centers. For students who may not come from families of voters, like American children of immigrants, earlier access to the ballot box could cement the habit of voting for the rest of their lives.
Right now, with a voting age of 18, the barriers to first-time voting are artificially high. By lowering the voting age to 16, students would be able to register to vote in high school, guiding them through the challenging process of voting for the first time.
Civic Education
Around the age of 16 is also when most students learn about their national, state, and local governments.
At 16, knowledge of the U.S. government is still recent, so students learning about their governments are eager to participate in the process. As Peter Cirincione, a government teacher at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, said in an interview with the HPR, “I ask the kids in my class if they would vote at the earliest opportunity … Are they excited to vote? Yes.”
Cirincione is in a unique position as a civics teacher: He has 16- and 17-year-old students who can vote in the city of Takoma Park, which became the first municipality in the U.S. to lower its local voting age to 16 in 2013. According to Cirincione, “it’s authenticity that makes this stuff applicable. Having a personal application? Yes. Undoubtedly that’s going to make it more engaging.”
Asking a 16-year-old to imagine their future civic engagement or describing how they have to participate in government indirectly — by impacting a person who can impact another person who can actually impact policy — is simply not as effective as giving them an immediate stake in the process. 16-year-old voters can directly apply what they learn in class, forging a permanent connection between the government they learn about at school and the government they are actively participating in. Concepts and structures become infinitely more compelling if students are given a stake in the process.
“I had a student this year who was writing in response to [a question] that she got to vote in Takoma Park, so she put a lot of work into [figuring] out what she was going to vote for,” said Cirincione. “It made these things much more real.”
A deeper connection, understanding, and appreciation of the process of civic engagement could go a long way in a country where only 32% of Americans can successfully name all three branches of government. Voting is the flagship method of political participation, and young people who can vote while they learn civics become directly invested in the political process.
Equity and Access
Today, communities of color face some of the steepest challenges to voting since the end of the Civil Rights movement. Georgia recently passed some of the most blatantly anti-democratic laws since the Jim Crow era, some of which are clearly meant to restrict access to the ballot box for Black Americans. Immigrants — whether undocumented or not — are often left out of the political process. One in every 16 voting-age Black Americans is disenfranchised due to mass incarceration. Lowering the voting age to 16 would precisely benefit these minority communities.
Benefiting minority communities means benefiting minority families. In an interview with the HPR, Tyler Okeke, a youth voting rights activist and former school board student member, said in his home city of Los Angeles “a large portion of students’ parents are undocumented, [so] enfranchising 16-year-olds would actually provide an opportunity for families who have been disenfranchised and have not had a say on school, city, county, state, and federal policy.” Young people who have voting-eligible immigrant parents and grandparents, like Okeke, “have already been active in helping their immigrant families digest politics and make political decisions, so it just makes sense for [the right to vote] to be extended to [them] as well.”
Communities of color also tend to skew younger than the general population, so allowing younger people to vote would allow the voting populace to more accurately reflect the present and future diversity of the United States. “We’re the most diverse generation the country has ever seen,” said Okeke. “Enfranchising more young people means you’re enfranchising a larger portion of the country’s people of color and there’s an immense value in that fact.”
Local Politics Revitalized
Local government is incredibly important, but few Americans actually follow their local politics. According to a survey by Johns Hopkins University, fewer than 20% of American citizens could name their state legislators, and a third could not name their governor. Lowering the voting age to 16 in local elections has the potential to revitalize local politics, reversing the modern trend toward apathy in local government.
Allowing young people to vote has brought new life to local politics and a new generation of locally-invested youth in Takoma Park, which has allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote since 2013. In Takoma Park, 16- and 17-year-old voters have had an overwhelmingly positive effect on local politics and have become heavily engaged stakeholders in the political process. This new youth voting bloc has furnished avid participants for the Takoma Park Youth Council established in 2017 and other local civic organizations.
In Takoma Park’s municipal elections, the voting turnout rate of registered 16- and 17-year-olds is between triple and quadruple the rate of the general population. As a proportion of the total voting-age population, 16 and 17-year-olds still vastly outperform the general population at almost double the turnout rate.
Takoma Park youth have also taken on leadership positions in local politics, bringing imaginative and tireless energy to local governance. In an interview with the HPR, Dana Graham, who served as Takoma Park Mayor Kate Stewart’s campaign manager while a 17-year-old high school senior, shared that she was not the only young person running Stewart’s campaign: “Our whole campaign team was for the most part young people, like seniors in high school, running the show.”
According to Graham, the Stewart campaign “was really young people-driven, which is particularly important for local issues because anytime you’re making a political decision, particularly on the local level, where these issues are things about roads and parks and community centers and schools, those are affecting first and foremost young people.”
Not only is local government especially important to young people, but local elections also present an accessible way to begin voting and extend a passion for civic engagement into a deeper investment in civic institutions beyond local elections. “People can get involved in local government easily to do local government things that can start this love of civic engagement that can last into their adult lives,” said Graham.
How to Fix Democracy
In a country with massive partisan divides and widespread political misinformation, we can create a system where voters are eager to learn about government and understand the issues at stake. When many are asking questions about the future of democracy, especially in the wake of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, we can all agree that the United States needs an educated voting population, an inclusive political process, and a culture of civic engagement. The most straightforward and momentous step we could take toward solving the problems of American democracy is lowering the voting age.
Young people are relentlessly imaginative. We dream of big things and a better world. Politics needs more of that, just as it needs more engagement and more civility. Lowering the voting age is not just an issue of whether or not 16-year-olds “deserve” the vote; it is the clearest path toward a more perfect democracy.
Image by Phil Roeder is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
