277
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
277 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10177 readers
25 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.