That the voting age should be lowered to 15

The right to vote (and I think my opponent will agree) is incredibly important. It carries with it the power to accomplish much, and profoundly affect the lives of millions, including most of those people one knows and loves. It requires a significant amount of responsibility, but it's a civic duty, because justice and good order in our society depends on a proper and well-functioning government. The exclusion of any person from a democratic vote, taken literally, is a message from the government that they're not considered people (democracy meaning "government by the people") and that their opinions count for nothing.There was once a time when society thought that of women. Since then we've seen women do amazing things in politics. The only reason they were denied the right was because the government was mostly controlled by mysogynists. Today, unfortunately, government is mostly controlled by ageists - people who sincerely believe that young people should not have equal rights to old, simply because of their age. It's irrational, because there is no rational link between having an 18th birthday and being qualified to perform this highly important task. This debate is about whether it's justified that 18-year olds with Down Syndrome can vote, but 17-year-old national model UN ambassadors cannot.My position today is simple - that 18 is not a justifiable boundry.EngagementThe reason why youth are often scapegoated as apathetic and disengaged delinquients with no sense of responsibility is because the're excluded from all of these processes. Why care about who to vote for if you can't even vote? Why learn about government when the government won't learn about you? Why should you have a responsibility to listen to the law when the law isn't responsive to anything you say? These concerns that youth have are legitimate. Excluding youth from politics has naturally created political apathy, and more dangerously, political resistance. That is why youth are often behind cybercriminal activities - they are searching for a meaningful form of political expression. Why? Because over at the government, a bunch of grandparents are making decisions about them without them. 15 years is old enough to work. It's old enough to pay taxes. It's old enough to drive, be a millionaire, and in many countries, to leave school or get married.The harm of political disengagement is threefold. First, it's a harm to society, who miss out on this very valuable subpopulation's opinions. The strength of democracy lies in the diversity of the voices it represents, creating incentives to improve life for all the voters. The harm is that young people cannot vote, and are thus usually excluded from that discussion. This is particularly pernicious when that discussion concerns what to do with young people and their problems, because youth have a whole set of political issues that almost exclusively affect them. Second, it's a harm to the disengaged students, who will usually carry forward that apathy or resistance to their adult years. Translation: higher crime, poorer voting, undemocratic society. And thirdly, it's a harm to the responsibility of society. Responsibility is learned, not earned with age. Schools are very good at teaching teenagers to be responsibile, but do not provide any incentives to. In fact, this kind of political disengagement is a strong disincentive. I don't think I need to justify to anybody that when we don't practice things as we learn them, we're not so good at them afterwards.EducationFor the same reason that business students are best placed to talk about business, or science students best placed to talk about science, so too are politics students best placed to talk about politics. 15 year olds are politics students. Put two and two together, and the point is that youth have the potential to be the most switched-on voters of them all. Youth are a huge group - my quick calculations show that this would increase the size of the voting population by about 10% in my country, and it's probably more in others. They have the potential to significantly affect the outcome of any given election. The net impact is, obviously, that better qualified candidates get elected, provided my premise holds true that youth are better qualified voters. In the long run, education is usually harder to forget if practiced both immediately and regularly thereafter. If nothing else, the fact that not only their social and economic future but also their educational future is at stake would provide greater incentives for them to actually use the resources that are available to them, which given the nature of the educational environment they are immersed in are much more objective and informative. In wider society, this more intelligent discourse brought about by young people can only improve the outcomes of the election.On the other hand, despite the already impressive ability for young people to be politically active, giving them the vote would create incentives to learn more. Being engaged at school is generally hard when half the subjects one is taught bear no relevance to a young person's real life. By contrast, giving them the vote makes everything relevant and important to their immediate life.ChangeAs people grow older, they become more conservative. This is a natural progression because people get used to existing social orders very easily given time. This is why so many old people were upset when they discovered in the early 90s (with the more widespread adoption of the internet and so on) that young people actually had political opinions. But the opinions of young people are quite different, because they reject these social orders and strive to create better ones. This has been happening for thousands of years, and as a result, the social orders have excluded the young from their ranks.This is bad because our society is not perfect, and we want to improve it. Conserving the status quo won't change a thing, but it's what older voters are naturally biased to. That's why we need people who will make change happen. Usually, youth tend to be the most progressive of all demographics (not necessarily in the liberal sense of that word), which is good because it helps our society improve faster and breaks down the social barriers to political discourse, building democracy. Young people also have the greatest incentives to make positive change, given that they ConclusionI'd like to have a serious chat to whoever came up with the age of 18 for voting. It's completely arbritrary. It's conferring no social benefit. It's disenfranchising the young and harming the whole electoral process.I'm proud to affirm.