Let Teens Vote

Washington state senator Scott White (D-Seattle) recently proposed legislation that would lower the voting age in school board elections to 14. The executive director of the National Youth Rights Association calls the bill a potential “pilot program” for the rest of the nation.

In many ways, the decision to limit the scope of the bill to school board elections, and only for students “in good standing,” shows how remarkably conservative America has become when it comes to the expansion of voting rights. Since the 26th Amendment, which lowered the national voting age from 21 to 18 forty years ago, voting rights in the United States have mostly stayed where they are. Several states now allow 17-year-olds to vote in primary elections so long as they have turned 18 by the day of the general election in November, but no state has gone any further. In some places, ex-convicts have seen their voting rights taken away. There is no federal law that prevents states from lowering the voting age, so why hasn’t a single state even experimented with doing so?

Proposals to lower the voting age are frequently qualified with patronizing suggestions that teens pass some sort of civics test before being allowed to vote. But in a country where only 34 percent of adults believe that there is solid evidence that human activity is causing global warming, can we really say that adults are significantly more qualified than teenagers to vote? Voting isn’t a privilege; it’s a right—and a duty. Although it might be unrealistic to expect toddlers to vote, 14-year-olds are more than capable of making independent decisions and we should not deny them the opportunity to exercise some control over who governs them.

In the case of starting off with school board elections, it’s a proposal that makes a lot of sense. One of the most common complaints from school reformers is that education debates are dominated by teachers' unions and parents, with little input from the actual students in the schools. Allowing teenagers to vote in their local school board elections would dramatically increase the relative power of students within the system. With all the noise being made about school choice, there’s little actual consideration of how best to incorporate students’ choices into education policy. Expanding voting rights to high school students might be the answer.

Nicolas Mendoza is a staff writer with Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at nicolas.f.mendoza@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter at @nicmend.

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