Lorraine Courtney Give teenagers right to have say at the ballot box
THERE will be a referendum to lower the voting age to 16 in June 2019. I’m very pro lowering it to 16 – if you can pay tax, legally leave school and make your own medical decisions, then of course you can go to a ballot box and make an informed decision about who to vote for.
I’ve met very politically aware and engaged 16 year olds, and people who are 50 and have no idea what they are talking about. The hope, too – and there is some research to back this up – is that casting a first ballot at 16 or 17 will lead to a lifetime of voting and civic engagement by Generation Z. That’s important.
I’ve listened to older people crowing on a recent ‘Liveline’ because they think 16 year olds aren’t capable of casting an informed vote. Ah yes teenagers, with their obsessions with their smartphones and their Xboxes, always wanting something for nothing and without a sensible thought in their social media-addled heads. Sure they’d probably vote for a Kardashian if given the chance.
I’ve heard the argument that if given suffrage, teens would just mimic their parents’ voting patterns anyway. That just reminds me of the historical argument against women’s suffrage: “You’ll just vote the way your husband votes.” You can’t cite peer pressure as a valid concern either. The Scottish referendum clearly showed that young people are voters with minds of their own.
The inclusion of 16 and 17 year olds was proposed by supporters of Scottish independence, who figured that younger voters would naturally back them up. 75pc of this age group turned out to vote, exploding that old chestnut that teens wouldn’t show up at a polling booth if invited. And instead of voting in a bloc, teens turned out to be very divided and not such radicals after all.
Austria became the first European country to lower the voting age to 16, back in 2011. Studies have shown that political interest among young Austrians increased when they were given the opportunity to vote and had the ability to debate the issues in school. Austrian skies didn’t fall down.
As we saw during 2015’s marriage equality referendum, when young people are suitably animated by a cause, they can influence the outcome. Establishment parties might feel threatened by that. Reducing the voting age was Fine Gael’s baby, first announced in 2010, but endlessly deferred since.
Extending the voting age would introduce more than 100,000 new voters into the political landscape and parties would have to offer young people policies aimed at them.
Another argument made against the extension is that young people are more likely to vote for left-wing parties. I’m not so sure. Certainly establishment parties might need to rethink their overwhelming focus on the older population at the expense of the younger if they are to gain votes, but that would be no bad thing. It would go some way to redressing the balance of Ireland’s voting demographic, which is skewed towards the older generation.
Fear of incurring the wrath of the grey vote has definitely built structural biases into political programmes. Services and benefits available to younger people were more aggressively stripped away during austerity, like cutting unemployment benefit for the under-25s. The pension, medical card for the elderly and free travel passes not so much.
I’m not sure many of our political parties ever actually bothered to properly consider young people in their manifestos up to now and they consistently fail to grasp that for plenty of young people, things are fairly grim. But they can afford to ignore young people entirely and treat them with contempt because
they are an insignificant section of the electorate. Next week’s Budget might ignore young people again and without a vote they are powerless to fight back.
So many of us graduate from college into unpaid internships and zero-hours contracts, and if we want to, we have to delay three major stages of “growing up” – buying a house, getting married or starting a family – because we simply can’t afford it. This has to change for the next batch of 20-somethings. Teens are affected by funding decisions, sometimes more than adults.
If you can’t vote, you don’t really count and democracy forgets that you exist.
If young people were a bigger cohort of voters it might not always have to be that way. What’s the worst that could happen? A free bus pass for every student? Voting at 16 would give more young people a chance to have their say at the ballot box, what is everybody so afraid of?