Libby Nelson argues that 16-year-old Americans should be allowed to vote:
A study of Austria’s expanded electorate found that 16- and 17-year-olds were not less informed than 18-year-olds. Nor were they less willing to participate in politics. And they could pick candidates who represented their own political beliefs just as well as older voters. That addressed several of the common arguments against lowering the voting age: that 16- and 17-year-olds simply aren’t ready to vote. …
During the 1960s, the movement to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 started in four states. It then spread nationwide with a constitutional amendment passed in 1971. A handful of states seem like a natural place to experiment with setting the voting age even lower today.
State legislatures set many of the policies that most directly affect 16-year-olds’ lives, from whether they’re able to drive to how much state funding their schools get to what they’ll eventually pay in college tuition. If we’re going to experiment with giving older teenagers a voice in politics, it makes sense to start at the state level, where it could make the most difference in their day-to-day existence. For the same reason, allowing younger voters into local school board elections would be a logical step.
Osita Nwanevu recommends we keep the age of candidacy in line with the voting age:
Even if progress on youth issues continues to stall and even if young candidates are beaten out by older and more established politicians—as they certainly will be most of the time—establishing a universal right to stand for public office is worthwhile on its own merits. “It’s sort of like in 1919, when the franchise was extended to women for 1920, if people had said, ‘Well all of this hinges on whether women will actually start voting in big numbers next year,’ ” Seery says. “The principle sort of trumps the practice.”
Whether it yields policy changes and boosts participation or not, a constitutional amendment doing away with age of candidacy restrictions will simply extend rights to a politically underprivileged constituency just as the 15th and 19th Amendments did for women and blacks—a worthy objective in and of itself.
The Dish 