Teens are ready to vote
A degraded era could use youthful idealism, energy
Voting — the definition in a democracy of having a voice — is our best opportunity to raise the level of national discourse from its current depths of dangerous immaturity.
While elected officials resort to name-calling and bullying on social media and refuse to do their homework on critical issues, a growing number of younger citizens — too young to vote — are stepping forward to demand and indeed to model honesty, reason, and ethical conviction. I would say they are the ones acting like adults, but in fact they are acting with all the integrity and idealism of their youth. These are qualities we need more of in political life.
We should allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote.
What was not long ago a fringe idea is now a growing movement in my state of Massachusetts and elsewhere. It tends to provoke a temporary moral panic — teenagers voting? They can’t even clean their rooms! But no more so than in 1968, when the cult film “Wild in the Streets” envisioned voting teens utterly destroying the social order. By 1971, the 26th Amendment had lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 to align with the age of military service. Chaos failed to ensue.
We are at a similar moment of national urgency. Like the draft, the decisions of politicians today disproportionately affect young people. School curricula are constantly politicized. Issues of gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights are endlessly legislated and litigated. Immigrant populations — children, teens, and their families — are all under threat. With climate change now a certainty against which we can only mitigate, young people are inheriting a planet whose very future is in jeopardy.
The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., bravely transformed their trauma and anger into a movement that did not just bring attention to gun violence but also empowered an entire generation toward political action. This summer, they were on a nationwide tour to raise gun control awareness and register voters ahead of the midterms.
It is a disturbing irony, then, that for all their bravery, their tireless work, their leadership, they can’t yet vote.
The contrast between the level of discourse we hear from 16- and 17-year-olds and the elected officials they are challenging is impossible to ignore. Suddenly, and finally, we are realizing that young people are able to command language, understand policy, and structure arguments geared toward real and needed solutions. Their arguments are so persuasive, their stories so powerful, that their less informed, less credible adult opponents are left grasping for a comeback — spinning laughable conspiracies of “crisis actors,” and when that falls flat, sputtering, “But they’re teenagers.”
The impressive activism displayed by the Parkland students has spurred renewed interest in lowering the voting age to include younger teens. Evidence shows they are more than capable, writes developmental psychologist Lawrence Steinberg. Sixteen-year-olds “can gather and process information, weigh pros and cons, reason logically with facts and take time before making a decision” with the same facility as adults.
Some municipalities are taking note. A Washington, D.C., council member, who was reportedly inspired by the March For Our Lives demonstration, recently reintroduced legislation to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. And in New York City, a group of students from Bard High School Early College on the Lower East Side have pushed for passage of the Young Voter Act, which would lower the voting age to 17 for state and local elections.
In Bard’s national network of early colleges, inspired by Bard College at Simon’s Rock, we have demonstrated that younger students are more than ready for greater intellectual challenge and social responsibility, and that if they begin early, they are more likely to complete college. There is a similar benefit to lowering the voting age: In Takoma Park, Maryland, which was the first city to take this important step, 16- and 17-year-olds are voting at consistently higher rates than 18- and 19-year-olds. Importantly, someone who has voted once is highly likely to keep voting.
The past year has made at least one thing clear: teenagers can’t wait to vote.
They shouldn’t have to.
The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., bravely transformed their trauma and anger into a movement that did not just bring attention to gun violence but also empowered an entire generation toward political action.
Ian Bickford is provost of Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass.