Correct. “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.”
Exactly, my objection is more of a logistical problem than “it’s impossible”. But I’m concerned about the feasibility of moving government class up in front of say, U.S. history. Or maybe moving world history back so freshmen take U.S. history and sophomores take government. Maybe a social studies teacher could weigh in on that, I don’t have the necessary expertise to say whether that is a realistic option. I’m willing to defer to their judgement.
~Max
I can see the headlines now:
Schools Accused of Outright Political Indoctrination
School Board Meeting Erupts Into Fistfight
Social Science Instructor Laid Off For Being A Democrat
~Max
Thank you, Max_S. I was think of that yesterday, but couldn’t figure out how to phrase it.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but in California, US Government was a senior year class. The age would depend on the individual student. I have a November birthday, so I was sixteen at the beginning of my senior year.***
***But I took Government in summer school before my senior year, so I took it entirely when I was 16.
In a lot of places, schools are out on voting day, anyway, because the schools themselves are often polling places.
And I don’t know about other states, but in Ohio, there’s a fair bit of US Government in middle school (grade 6-8) social studies classes.
That’s right, now that I think about it we did learn about the three branches, basic checks and balances, how a bill becomes a law, what is a constitution, what is a democracy, and other basic stuff like that, back in middle school. I seem to remember a Schoolhouse Rock! video.
But things like the federalism, electoral college, legislative committees, the regulatory state, enumerated powers, the jurisprudence of eg: civil rights, I don’t remember learning until high school, senior year.
~Max
Eminently sensible.
The problem with the argument is that you can keep it going until it is turtles all the way down. If you make the voting age 12, I’m sure I could point out some pretty intelligent 11 year olds, at least as smart as some 12 year olds.
And note that we never go the other way. We don’t say that kid is 19, but he is as dumb as a hammer, so no voting for him.
Yes, 18 is arbitrary just like 21 for drinking or 70mph on the highway or a 0.08 blood alcohol level. But you cannot have an administrable system if you had to make individual determinations for 350 million people for everything.
I wonder about the reality of the ability for this to happen, even. I remember when kids were trying to organize anti-gun protests at schools after the Parkland shooting, and people were LOSING THEIR EVER LOVING MINDS about kids having the ability to form and express their opinions, and missing 30 minutes of the school year to go outside.
You can imagine who those people were. Not me, I’m all for the kids protesting. But you add those 70 million folks to lefties like me who say “eh, I don’t think lowering the voting age is a good idea” and I’m not sure how much support a measure like this would get.
I’d be fine with it, provided we also lower the age to sign binding contract to age 16, and lower the age of criminal responsibility to 16.
You say adolescent brains aren’t developed enough at that age to be criminally responsible? Then what are they doing picking our leaders?
This gets things precisely wrong.
While the voting age is currently 18, almost every single state ceases juvenile court jurisdiction at age 17, and uses adult court for offenders 17 and older. So right now, the vast majority of American 17-year-olds can be tried in adult court but cannot vote. Vermont is the only state that does not shift from juvenile to adult court as a matter of course until age 18.
Not only that, but every single state has laws that allow offenders younger than 17 to be tried in adult court for more serious crimes. And 13 states have no minimum age at all for prosecuting children as adults.
If anything needs to change here, it’s that guidelines for child prosecutions should be brought more into line with our current definitions of adulthood for other purposes (voting; drinking; military service; etc.). Why should a kid be prosecuted as an adult at age 14 (which happens with some regularity), but not be able to vote for four more years?
Pretty much word for word. I don’t care either way and it will make essentially zero difference. Because…
Young people don’t vote. At least not in large numbers. The deeply politically engaged among them mostly do so and quite passionately at that. But most teenagers aren’t deeply politically engaged and no one has ever been able to get enough of them motivated at once to make significant difference. People have been touting the power of the youth vote since time immemorial and it just never amounts to much of note. Just ask poor old Bernie Sanders.
When I went to HS in CA it was a senior year course. As it happens I graduated at 17, so I actually did start it at 16. But since that particular course that particular year was a waste of educational space it amounted to nothing useful anyway 
(they shoehorned a teacher who never taught it into doing it that year and while a heck of a nice guy his heart wasn’t into it).
We hear much of the same thing with the drinking age–if I can go to war at age 18, why do I need to be 21 to have a beer?
Respectfully, I’m not sure where this idea originates from. It seems to assume that for everything in life whether voting, driving, beer, buying guns, criminal responsibility that there must be one age at which the day prior you have almost zero privileges or responsibilities, and then the next day everything is open to you.
What is wrong with a system that eases people into it? At X age, you can do these things. At X+2 years we add a few more. Rinse and repeat until at a certain age, all legal things are available to a person. I don’t really support or oppose that idea, but why is it assumed that such a thing cannot be?
There’s a principle in web design called feature detection. The idea is that every web browser is different and might not support the feature you want to appear on your website. The solution is to treat every visitor to your website as an individual and try to determine whether they can handle the features you want to use. You might do a harmless little test that only succeeds if the feature is supported, and then only offer that feature if the test succeeds. This is generally considered far superior than simply checking what browser is being used.
The analog for driving would be the driving test; the analog for voting would be the literacy test (not just of literacy but also basic civics). I won’t bother suggesting a literacy test to gate all state and local voting, but I will suggest one for minors. I think the social studies teachers of the state should form a committee to draft the actual test itself, and there would need to be alternate test taking procedures for those who cannot take tests in the traditional fashion.
~Max
Either someone has the right to vote or they do not so we don’t need to test for it on any level. There is no compelling reason to warrant the cost and effort of setting up a system to test minors for literacy and I doubt such a thing wouldn’t have a disparate impact on minorities or the poor.
Imagine all the great vote harvesting potential 
I’m not very receptive to granting minors the unconditional right to vote. If it must be a yes or no without any nuance, my answer is no.
~Max