Why Shouldt the Voting Age Stay at 18

Introduction

Voting is at the heart of being a good citizen. It is a civic duty, not a commodity. Voting is a responsibility we must embrace to see change and solutions accomplished. So essential is its role in the democratic process that elites spend billions of dollars seeking to influence our votes. But something our government can’t control is the age of its voters. There is an ongoing debate about whether 18-20-year-olds are equipped to vote. Many argue that they are not informed enough, while others have pointed to reason and science that suggest these disenfranchised Americans have a great stake in the policies of their respective governments.

We must hold the line at 18, and there are two main reasons for that.

First, to be a voter requires being informed. In America, the average voter is lamentably ignorant about the issues upon which he or she is deciding. He or she makes decisions based on party affiliation, name recognition, or herd instinct. However, I believe that ignorance is not a function of age. I know some 16-year-olds who follow the news more intensely, more densely, and more maturely than some adults who could vote. It’s often not age that confounds information, but readership, educational opportunities, and ultimately personal responsibility. The problem, it seems, is not how old our citizens are when they start voting, but when they start reading.

Historical Perspectives on Voting Age

The age of majority and its connection to the right to vote has shifted historically and relatively to the specific country and legal regime. In England, there was no strict age designation for the right to vote because suffrage was determined by socio-economic or ecclesiastical criteria. Although the Scottish Reform Act of 1868 ostensibly set the minimum voting age at 21, those who were married and owned land were already allowed to vote at an age younger than 21 upon the marriage of the bride. The suffrage movements also had an indirect impact on the minimum voting age. The connection of suffrage with a qualification of property or income reflected class prejudice and a male gender bias, and was a barrier to young voters. By advocating for universal adult suffrage that would be untethered to personal assets or income, the extension of suffrage addressed, albeit obliquely, the concerns that kept the voting age anchored to the age of majority or majority suffrage. Consequently, in some states, the voting age was equal to the right to vote or women’s enfranchisement whenever universal suffrage was realized. Even if the minimum voting age was a discriminatory socio-political tool, its alignment with a particular right of a historically marginalized population could have functioned as a youth-right compensation.

Development in Adolescents

Recent research in psychology and the neurosciences has demonstrated that the capacity to make complex, ambiguous decisions continues to develop into a person's mid- to late-twenties. The processes that support cognitive development also serve a purpose: deep emotional reactions become increasingly integrated with our thinking selves as we grow, leading to a better, more sophisticated 'gut sense' to guide decision making. Areas of the brain crucial for decision making, including those necessary for control of emotional responses, continue to develop in late adolescence. Age-related developments in these parts of the brain, and their connections with other areas, may underpin many of the cognitive and behavioral differences between adolescents and adults. The findings of developmental scientists suggest that this developmental trajectory is adaptive: it prepares us for roles and responsibilities that require sound judgment.

We have argued that chronological age provides only a crude index of these relevant facts about an individual. Now, we maintain that voters are more than decision makers: they are citizens whose interests help to determine political representation. Democracy entails more than accurate vote counting; it gives us all the right to try to shape the kind of society we will live in. Though the youthful vote share may be small, it is inherently unfair to look so dismissively at those who will have to live with the consequences of government decisions for the longest. While it is most certainly the case that some younger adolescents can reason and reliably perform tasks relevant to voting, the point of the question, we suggest, is to establish when the majority stand a good, and not just a fighting chance, and there is no reason from a psychological perspective to believe the eighteenth birthday is a turning point. Insofar as adolescents differ from 18-year-olds in ways relevant to voting, then we can say that the overwhelming majority of studies on the topic leave us comfortable with the contention that this is the case, advocating for a voting age threshold located at least at the midpoint of the second decade. The key developmental changes relevant to voting occur between the ages of 16 and 21.

Impact of Lowering the Voting Age

Given the importance of electoral integrity, there are valid reasons in support of these age restrictions. Yet some are in favor of lowering the voting age, arguing that since this group will have to live longer with decisions made today, they should be able to vote on their future. Four reasons are often cited why one should resist this movement. Firstly, children and young people lack adults’ real-life experiences and may thus take less responsible voting decisions or decisions less in line with the majority of voters. For example, compared to older voters, 16- and 17-year-old voters are more in favor of pro-bitcoin parties and climate activists. It is noted that children tend to oppose law and order parties with a focus on security issues. Secondly, it is feared that reducing the voting age would create new dynamics in society. It is feared that youngsters will even be further cornered by unrealistic idealistic perspectives – or under the influence of high hopes, high hesitations, or unrealistic perspectives – also in the EU – considering a vote as an expression of emotional preferences rather than as a search for evidence-based solutions. Finally, lobbyists and interest groups could come to exert an undue and damaging influence on children’s voting position. For example, it was noted that children are more positive than adults about the idea of taxing billionaires to pay for sustainable goals. Others fear that kids can “bug” politicians. Previous studies have also noted that children tend to enroll in the political beliefs of their parents and therefore are susceptible to influence by friends and opinion leaders, as can be seen in the prevalence of certain parties on social media. Arguments that they would not be susceptible to group influences are not borne out of everyday practice. In some countries, children's groups have already been used to influence candidates or to attract the polarization vote. For example, in one instance, a political party tried to mobilize the so-called “new prodigy voters” by organizing school classes on how to “push the country where they want it to be.” In another case, children with voting rights are called upon to vote on a referendum on another municipality’s playground. In a city, a number of children were recently called upon to also vote for the city council elections. Among other things, an election video was shown to 13-16 year olds in which all parties stated what they wanted for young people in the city. However, this legally worrying initiative has already received criticism from the government itself.

Conclusion

In conclusion, regardless of whether one maintains the current voting age of 18 years or cuts it either to 16 or 17 years of age, each of the objections to lowering the voting age operates under a misguided understanding of adolescent cognitive development; the historical emergence of US voting age law in the turbulent 1960s, where claims about youthful impetuosity, radicalism, instability, underdevelopment, and susceptibility to charismatic turpitude were advanced; the empirical evidence from psychology on the relationship between the minimum voting age and cognitive decision-making; and appeals to the meaningfulness of the results in political psychology research on a “political reasoning threshold.” In each of these cases, the results seem at odds with the empirical picture, or their conclusions drawn from it are philosophically problematic.

All of them amount to non sequitur. Hence, the debate regarding the lower threshold for policy change is still young. If it is reopened at all, it makes more sense to discuss and let voters—young and old alike—discuss at what age the right to vote first becomes theirs, if at all, rather than what age they first become old enough to withhold the vote from them. It is also quite plausible that the latent discourse around the young and voting, intelligible as an adult responsibility, is partly to blame for voting age laws operating to buttress political disaffection. Once voting is intelligible as a responsibility of adulthood, holding 18-year-olds, no longer minors, responsible for voting is a way to enforce adult suffrage. The issue deserves further thought and discussion. In the meantime, whether or not the issue of youth voting is further discussed, maintaining a voting age of 18 is crucial to the integrity of American democracy. Given that a cornerstone of democracy is an informed citizenry, the US cannot afford to tolerate laws that may institutionalize political disenfranchisement of politically informed, responsible young adults that would be created with a lower voting age.

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