It shouldn't surprise us that the same people who support voter ID laws to keep students from voting would also oppose Nancy Pelosi's call to modernize America's voting age to 16. Two suburbs of Washington, DC already have a voting age of 16, and in both cities, voters younger than 18 have a voter turnout rate significantly higher than the turnout rate for voters older than 18. These cities haven't suffered at all for making their cities more democratic. Young people are thrilled to participate, and voters of all ages have quickly come to support this change. The results have been so positive that other cities are now preparing to modernize their own voting ages.
It should not surprise us either that the critics who are screaming about this can't seem to do so honestly. They certainly don't want to admit their goal is to suppress the votes anyone who might vote against them. So instead they use arguments built on falsehoods.
"Perhaps things were different when Nancy Pelosi was a teenager, but high school kids today, with some exceptions, have little awareness of civics and the political process beyond hashtag slogans and the fact that Barack Obama hangs with Jay-Z and Beyonce," rants one Republican. His evidence? He offers none.
Neither does the critic who wrote: "She’s been off her meds too long ... 16 year olds are too busy texting the person sitting next to them to have any idea what is going on in the world. What we don’t need is more uninformed voters. Of course, that’s what people like Nancy want because otherwise they don’t get reelected."
In reality, this stereotype of the ignorant teenager has been thoroughly disproven. A 2011 study by Rutgers University found that 16-year-olds in America are as civicly sophisticated as their older, voting counterparts.
More importantly, studies have shown that when countries lower their voting age to 16, it motivates 16-year-olds to become even more engaged and more informed. When Austria lowered its voting age to 16, for example, a study found "political interest of 16- and 17-year-olds was higher after lowering the voting age [and] the development of political interest among young people seems to be associated with the 'life event' of enfranchisement."
Opponents continue: "Of course, Pelosi and Democrat strategists know that lowering the voting age and registering high schoolers [is] about roping in easily manipulated, ignorant herds of uninformed voters who are more inclined to buy into the idealistic fantasy of a utopian leftist future." In other words, "I don't want those people voting because they might not vote the way I want." Another right-winger rants, "It doesn’t matter to elitists like Pelosi whether the voter is an informed voter. She simply wants them to vote the way they are told, based upon ideas and accusations hurled regarding the Republican party in order to gin up anger, strife, animosity and Democrat votes."
But is it true that 16-year-olds are more easily controlled than older people? Any high school teacher who has tried to control a classroom full of 16-year-olds will tell you it's not that easy. And in the voting booth, they display quite independent judgement. When Scotland held their 2014 referendum on independence, 16-year-old voters were part of that. A studyfound that only 56% of voters younger than 18 voted the same was as the people who were in the best position to manipulate them: their parents. 56% is barely more than you would expect from random chance. The study concluded teenaged voters were exercising independent judgement and were no more manipulated than voters of any other age. Studies on teenaged voters in other countries have found the same thing.
Still another argument leveledat Pelosi: "The left indoctrinates students at an early stage in their educational process. With Common Core, students are being taught anti-American, anti-capitalism lessons. Students have even been taken to questionable field trips to mosques and, within Pelosi’s own state, were taken on a field trip and forced to witness a gay wedding. These are but a few examples of the far-left, progressive indoctrination of our youth by the Left as they work to get them to view capitalism as bad and socialism/Marxism as good."
While colleges usually are dominated by liberals, K-12 schools are actually dominated by social conservatives. In every high school where I've worked, staff were less concerned about test scores than about cracking down on girls wearing short skirts or boys wearing t-shirts that acknowledged the existence of beer. Writings by liberals like Martin Luther King are heavily redacted. K-12 schools across America use textbooks shaped by Texas censors, and English teachers are largely confined to using novels written before 1960, promoting old ideas about gender-roles and lifestyles and social norms without even acknowledging newer ideas exist. Anyone finding our K-12 schools too liberal would have to be really far to the right.
The fact that critics cannot present a truthful argument should tell you something. Pelosi and others who have called for a lower voting age must be on the right track.