16 Year olds should be able to vote, heres why

The concept of changing the voting age from 18 to 16 seems radical at first glance but as you analyze the arguments around it, you may also feel that this small change would be a great step for our country to take. Here are the key arguments surrounding this debate :D

The first point that I would like to make is that over these past few years we have seen incredibly large outpours of political actions taken by youth seen from the numbers of young voters as well as the two most notable social movements in the past half decade being the March For Our Lives movement and the Black Lives Matter movement, both being spearheaded by the youth. It is clearly evident by these two movements that high school students are politically engaged and active in many different ways.

Having 16 year olds be a part of the voting process allows for much more diverse political conversations with many new creative ideas being thrown out simply due to more people being involved. Beyond diversifying the conversation, this also allows this conversation to be within the walls of high schools and leads to students being politically engaged at a younger age which has been proven to lead to people being more likely to vote for the rest of their lives.

“Taxation without representation” was a really big issue in the late 1700s in America and is one of the rallying cries from our revolutionary war but it still exists today among a very specific group of individuals, the youth. A vast amount of high school students start working around the ages of 16 and 17 but have no say in their representation to congress. I’m not so sure our founding fathers would be too happy with that one.

Here are the two main counter arguments and my rebuttals to those.

The first argument you always hear on this issue is that the youth are too impressionable and are more likely to vote just like their parents. The second argument is often that these 16 and 17 year olds have not learned enough or gone through the proper education.

To refute those arguments I would like to point out a few things. First is that people are “impressionable” until they are about 25 which is when their frontal lobe fully develops. Second is that a 16 year old can legally drop out of school and then vote at 18 with the same education as any 16 year old. Third is that politics are not taught in school whatsoever, like at all. You aren’t taught what a democrat or republican is. You don’t know anything about modern era politics beyond 9/11 and the wars that came from it. People become politically aware around the age of 18 because of the fact that they can vote at that age, not because they are taught politics senior year of high school.