We Need a 16-year-old Voting Age
Teenage enfranchisement is a vital step towards both meaningful democracy and climate action.
Young people propelled President-elect Biden to victory. Every day leading up to the presidential election in November, records were broken as hundreds of thousands of young people cast their votes early: 70 percent of voters ages 18-29 cast early or absentee ballots. Those young voters supported Biden over Trump by a 61-36 margin. More recently, hundreds of thousands of voters under thirty again played a pivotal role in flipping the Senate Democratic, electing Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the Georgia runoff elections. While shifts in voting rules caused by the Coronavirus pandemic certainly played a part in youth turnout, the early numbers and exit polling showed that young people are ready for change amidst extreme police violence and escalating climate change. Climate organizers made enormous contributions to that outcome in their effort to remove a flagrant denier and deregulator from office.
Democrats are drawing up governance reforms now that they have retaken the Presidency and the Senate, including crucial climate policies. The longevity and effectiveness of any of these reforms rely on the continued defeat of Republicans at the polls. As a method for ensuring that outcome, lowering the voting age is as crucial as expanding the Supreme Court and DC Statehood. Suffrage for 16-year-olds should be a pillar of the new Democratic agenda.
If one issue ever brought the legitimacy of the 18-year-old voting age into question, it’s climate change. Teenagers are being excluded from voting in elections that will determine their future while fossil fuels burn on. Youth disenfranchisement is an urgent crisis of racial justice in addition to political representation. Just as the residents of DC, a place with more Black Americans per capita than any voting state, need representation, so do the people of our country’s most diverse generation. Their voices are currently unheard with rights withheld. These teenage Americans will live with the consequences of climate change and environmental racism for the rest of their lives; investing in frontline communities means investing in them.
Given these disparities, the climate Left should take a strong stance on youth enfranchisement. Numerous pieces of evidence establish the connection between lowering the voting age and climate action. A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that Americans age 13-17 feel less helpless about climate change than any voting age group while also feeling more motivated than any age group other than 18-29 year olds. The UK-based Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found an expansion of suffrage to 16- and 17-year-olds would ameliorate the intergenerational injustice embodied by inaction on climate change by giving more affected people a say. In the US, the connection has been made all the more obvious over the past two years by leadership from the 16- and 17-year-old members of the Sunrise Movement and US Climate Action Network who have been instrumental in a climate awakening. If Emily Trelstad and Amalia Hochman—both 17—organized the 10,000-strong Boston Climate Strike, why shouldn’t they be able to vote?
For the most part, critics of a 16-year-old voting age have focused on the limited political information held by young people. Yet youth voter political awareness has been repeatedly shown to be on par with other voters — perhaps unsurprising, given that many are in a US history, politics, or government class every day, a distinction no other age group can claim. Moreover, the positions of young voters on many issues, including climate change, show they are far more in line with reality than the electorate overall. Following these observations, the political scientists Robert Atkins and Daniel Hart argued in 2011 that 16- and 17-year-olds met the core qualities of citizenship (membership, concern for rights, and societal participation) and therefore should be able to vote. Kelsey Piper makes a convincing case that voters are already known to be irrational or uninformed. On what criteria, then, are we excluding younger potential voters?
The State of Youth Suffrage
Lowering the voting age in the United States further would hardly be a vanguard move. Many countries across three continents have adopted a 16-year-old voting age, including Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Austria, and Scotland. In Brazil, the voting age was reduced to 16 by the 1988 constitution, adding additional voters equivalent to 1-2% of the electorate. In Recife, a northeastern Brazilian city the size of Philadelphia, voting power in some cases extends lower: students ages 5-15 have a vote on their school budget.
The needed measures have been proposed in the United States, but there is organizing to be done. Most recently, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley introduced a bill to lower the voting age to 16. Though it ultimately fell 126-305, the vote was taken with somewhat limited outside pressure and there are reasons to think it could be a lot closer. More progressives have entered Congress this year, and new efforts with their support can further tie suffrage into the goals of the intersectional organizations who got them elected. Many members of Congress have limited exposure to the issue, which explains why many abstained, so there is ample room for movement. Shifting 90 votes in the House and growing support in the Senate can be achieved by mobilizing would-be young voters to demand a right to suffrage - an opportunity to bolster the electoral fortunes of both at-risk centrist Democrats and progressives at once. New supporters would give centrists more breathing room to vote for popular progressive measures.
A campaign strategy for lowering the voting age must heed lessons from earlier efforts to change age requirements. Tying the voting age to specific electoral issues has historically been effective for expanding the popularity of the linked issue while inching closer to universal representation. In the late 1960s, anti-Vietnam war activists decried the incongruity between 18-year-old conscription and 21-year-old suffrage. Subsequent coalescence among the Left around the voting demand expanded opposition to a catastrophic proxy war abroad and bolstered support for democracy at home. The 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, was ratified in 1971 by a vote of 401-19. The amendment campaign concretized why the draft was wrong, and the anti-war movement gave 18- to 20-year-olds a clear reason to demand a say in their survival and future. Employing the same logic today would integrate young people’s political demands, bring new people into the climate movement, and contribute to turning the tide against fossil fuels. People who gained the right to vote due to climate change won’t soon forget.
Towards Expanded Representation
More than creating a new campaign, we can include expanded teenage voting rights in our demands for Biden’s first 100 days. As we take on police violence, racial injustice, and the climate crisis we can continue to elevate the importance of youth voting as some groups like Power California have for years. Now we need to normalize its place in governance packages that are both just at face value and strategically necessary to building a better world.
Enfranchising 16- and 17-year-olds would add millions of voters to the electorate, voters who are more concerned about climate change than any other age group. Moreover, the gains these voters could provide for Left electoral politics are substantial, and there is little reason to continue their exclusion from the process. Youth enfranchisement should be a pillar of left mobilization and a crucial demand of the incoming and administration. Just as more than ten million undocumented immigrants need a path to citizenship, young people need expanded citizenship. As a fundamental part of investing in frontline communities to combat the climate crisis, we must expand their rights.
Saul Levin is a climate justice organizer and policy writer. He tweets @saaaauuull.
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