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Missouri teens want to lower the voting age to 16 in local and school elections
(news.stlpublicradio.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Politics
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I also like to draw analogies to other age restrictions. If they're allowed to drive a car, literally the most dangerous thing they can do in terms of causes of death, then how can they not be responsible enough to vote for their leaders?
We also have no qualms about sentencing 16 year olds as adults if they commit a bad enough crime. This one strikes me as society knowing 16 year olds are perfectly capable of being responsible but we just give them a bit more leeway.
And personally, I've met plenty of 16 year olds that are better informed about politics than a number of adults I know.
I am so happy to find people like you here in fediverse. (I'm viewing this from kbin; not sure where you are; doesn't matter! Here we are. It's great.) I've been absolutely crucified on Reddit for posting pro-youth sentiments. It feels like most of society treats young people like dangerous aliens or something. So to find a friendly voice so quickly is really uplifting.
Driving a car carries immediate physical consequences, something much easier to grasp than abstract consequences.
We don't dump everything on them at once, because each step of adulthood and personal responsibility is hard.
Sure, and this is another gradation of voting; this would only be for local and school elections, which can have pretty immediate consequences for teens. In fact, 16 year olds (and others around that age) are the best positioned to have a say about school board policy, because they have been and currently are directly affected.
I do appreciate your perspective that a 'stepwise' system of adulthood can have huge benefits. I think this proposal actually fits quite nicely into it. They aren't voting for president; they're voting for the who will run the place they spend 8 hours per day.
Maybe it depends on where you live. Currently, our local politics is poorly attended. I shudder to think of the average local teen making community decisions. Among other things, we would end up with no police and my community is already stained for police presence (though some would consider that an advantage, I live too close to a high school to be comfy with that.) I'm guessing in more affluent areas, that might not be a big of a risk, but it definitely is here. Most teens here don't traditionally work anyways.
Voting within their school, sure. But not at the community level.
Hmm, yeah, I think we have fundamentally different positions if you see the average teen voting for less policing to be ill informed or disastrous. I don't mean this in a snarky way, I mean I think we would have a lot of ground to cover before agreeing on this point one way or another.
The one thing I would consider is you probably don't know what the average teen in your community thinks, because they do not have a political voice. Sure, they can attend community council meetings, but why do that when they aren't able to choose who sits on that council? Teens being disengaged from community issues and teens not being able to have input on community issues are fundamentally linked.
I agree with school, just disagree with local community voting. They don't own or rent homes, and therefore have near-zero consequence for the outcome.