One blogger disagrees with Matt and DJW’s support for lowering the voting age. His argument:

So, if we’ve established that there should be some age restrictions for voting, it becomes clear that the distinction between 17 and 18, or 16 and 18, etc. is pretty arbitrary. There’s no significant reason to choose one over the other; there was a compelling reason to choose 18 over 21 during the Vietnam years, when people who couldn’t vote were being killed for no reason, but even then it would have been easier, and just as sensical, to raise the military entry age to 21. Matt’s argument that allowing 16-year-olds to vote would create a more civically aware populace aside (though I do think it’s reasonable and probably correct), it’s simply too difficult and not worthwhile to amend the Constitution to change the voting age by a few years.

What minipundit overlooks, and indeed what most people overlook with this discussion is young people themselves. The right to vote isn’t a small matter. You can’t just shrug it off and go “well maybe its reasonable, but its just not worth the effort”. Tell that to the people under 18 who want to vote and would vote but aren’t allowed to.

I wonder what minipundit thinks about other disenfranchisements of voters? There were rumors that voters were prevented from accessing the polls on election day in 2004 and in 2000. Don’t ask me whether it happened or not, but if it did isn’t that something to get upset over? I’m sure if it were proven minipundit and many others would be quite upset that a few dozen or a few hundred voters were disenfranchised. I bet they wouldn’t shrug it off and say “meh, it may have been wrong, but its not worth the trouble of fixing.”

Why then react that way when millions of young Americans are disenfranchised?

If we recognize that the right to vote is important then why would we shrug when people are denied that right? The burden of proof lays squarely on those who wish to deny another the right to vote.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.