The Movement to Lower the Voting Age has Begun. The movement to lower the voting age has begun. On March 25th, a bill to lower the voting age in the state of Maine passed committee with an overwhelming vote of 11-2. This follows the introduction of a city referendum to lower the voting age to 16 in Anchorage, Alaska. After much work on this, the measure missed the ballot by one vote. Last year the city council in Cambridge, Massachusetts passed an ordnance lowering the voting age to 17 for local elections. Local youth groups in Florida, North Dakota and Washington, DC. are busy working on the issue in their areas as well. [kuro5hin.org]
When I think back to high school, a few things come to mind. For one, I knew 10 times more about anything political, economic, world, etc than my mom or most adults I knew ever did. My entire group of friends was like that. Now, we may not have been your average group of high school students, but if you took high school as a microcosm of society, it would seem to be pretty well matched up. There was us, who were rather political, and knowledgeable about the world, to the ones who cared, and knew the basics, down to the stoners. I know all those same groups in society at large. So if you are going to deny 16 year olds the right to vote because of the not-so knowledgeable in the group, shall we apply that same stricture to society at large? If we do, then a great part of society would not be able to vote.
If you take another look at society, than you will see the ones who don't vote, mostly don't care, are largely the people who don't know what is going on in society to any real degree. Yet they have the right to vote. Many of the people who do vote, vote a straight ticket, with no idea who or what they are voting for. Yet they are allowed to vote. And yet we deny that same right to the youth. The youth who can be executed by the state, who pay taxes, who are persecuted by the laws of our nation, and yet have no say whatsoever in the shaping of those laws, those policies, those taxes.
There was a time not to long ago when our society didn't believe that blacks should vote, because they were "inferior" to whites. Our society didn't believe that women should vote, because they were "inferior" to men. Obviously neither group had the intellectual capacity to understand how to punch a hole in a piece of paper, and to understand what that hole means.
Should we take the right to vote away from blacks, women, incompetents? Or should we give it to the youth?
No Taxation Without Representation!!! Isn't that how the saying goes?
11:20:09 PM 
