Voting Age Should be Lowered to 16

Introduction Hello, Con! I am excited to debate this issue for many reasons: my primary one, however, is because I have not debated in a long time and this looks like a good debate to get myself back in gear. It is an interesting idea, and you make some pretty interesting points. However, I feel I can counter them, and provide a few good reasons of my own for why the voting age should be lowers, or, at least, why eighteen year olds are no more responsible or mature than a sixteen or seventeen year old. I know that this will fulfill my burden of proof, but it will at least, hopefully, show why your arguments are not quite as good as you may believe them to be, in my opinion. That being said, let's start with rebuttals! Rebuttal 1: Maturity My primary issues with this point are that you have not provided statistical support for your claim, and you are begging the question. You are basing your reasoning behind why you believe eighteen year olds are more mature than sixteen year olds on things such as military age. However, this conclusion is under the assumption that eighteen year olds are mature enough to join the military, or that sixteen year olds are not mature enough to. The primary reason why the age to join the military is eighteen and not sixteen is because most sixteen year olds are in high school. This is not a problem of maturity, but a problem of circumstance. Of course, I can also turn this argument around and say that, because sixteen year olds are mature enough to own and drive a car, they should be allowed to vote. I am sure you disagree with this reasoning: but why? It is the same reasoning you are using with why they should not; I'm only turning it on its head. In fact, you made this point for me! “If 18 year olds are not yet mature enough to walk into a pub how can they be mature enough to decide the future of an entire country.” I would hardly say that the amount of teenagers paying taxes is low: “At any given time approximately 45% of 16-17 year olds will be working and up to 80% of all teens will have a job before they graduate from high school. ” (1) If you have a job, even as a teenager, you pay taxes. That does not even take into account the fact that teens overall spent an estimated 9.7 billion in sales taxes alone! (2) Our brain is not fully developed until we hit thirty. Indeed. Are you arguing that we should increase the voting system, then, to 30? Rebuttal 2: Experience Why would you not trust a sixteen year old with your life? What about a sixteen year old makes them more untrustworthy than an eighteen year old? Furthermore, sixteen year olds cannot run for office. This is true. However, neither can an eighteen year old. Can you guess what the youngest age you can be to run for any political office in the United States of America? 25. (3) Are you arguing that we should raise the age to 25? But they are not fully developed themselves; so, 30? Yes, most 16 or 17 year olds have not had a long-term job or have run their own lives. But neither will an 18 year old: in fact, most people will not have this responsibility until they leave college, which is usually around 22 (given that post people finish college with a bachelor's degree). This is not even mentioning the fact that, whoever is on the ballot, adults will vote for at the same percentage as children. If children can vote bad, than adults can vote bad as well. There is no objectively wrong vote, though; one's opinion is their own. Your basic argument regarding the whole untrustworthy children when it comes to making decisions is one that can be applied to any adult. After all, I wouldn't trust just any adult with my life. Sixteen year olds would have the same options as adults. Rebuttal 3: Responsibility That logic is just silly. You must prove that a sixteen year old cannot fulfill the role of a juryman. The primary reason they are not is, once again, a problem of circumstance: being on jury requires that you miss school. Furthermore, juryman are decided based on voting registrars; you have to vote to be a part of a jury! So, this begs the question: 16 or 17 year olds cannot vote because they cannot be juryman because they cannot vote. This is circular logic. Point 1: No taxation without representation It is what the founding fathers fought for: teenagers pay quite a bit in taxes, as I have already pointed out in rebuttal one. As such, they deserve the same level of representation as others who pay taxes. Indeed, they may not pay the same amount in taxes as everybody else, but circumstances have always been a factor in what taxes are given to what people. After all, 47% of people do not pay income tax, because of age or socioeconomic standing (most are elderly or poor, or both). Point 2: Stability Sixteen and seventeen are good times to vote, stability-wise. Eighteen is one of the worst times, in fact. Sixteen and seventeen year olds are stationary; they attend school and have a regular social life. They have no real major changes that affect their lives. However, eighteen year olds are generally transitioning to colleges, attempting to find stable employment, and sometimes trying to find a place to live. This is also a time of economic instability: after all, college is significantly more expensive than anything you'll need to pay for in high school, and those who do not go to college still need to find a way to sustain themselves outside of their parent's homes. They are still trying to settle down. Point 3: Voter Turnout Voter turnout will increase if you lower the voting age. Studies such as Merrill's study of five states that had implemented a program called Kids Voting USA, which gives children information on voting and politics, and five states that did not implement the program. He found that parent turnout increased three percent, due to parents being inspired to vote due to their kid's enthusiasm to voting. The number was as high as nine percent in some states! (4) It would be logical, therefore, that voter turnout would increase in both children and adults if the voting age was lowered. Point 4: Unique point of view Voters will, obviously, vote based on their circumstances in life. As teenagers have a different point of view as, say, a mentally senile seventy-three year old man (who has just as much right to vote as a mentally stable thirty year old), they will provide a unique point of view to the election. Along with that, their views will be heard and considered by politicians when they make political decisions that affect things such as education and raising or lowing minimum wage, as just a few examples. Conclusion I eagerly await my opinion's response. This was a lot of fun! Best of luck to my opponent; his opinions are interesting, but I am curious of his actual position: is he in favor of keeping the minimum age of voting at eighteen? Or is he in favor of increasing the voting age? Based on what he said, it seems like the latter. If that is the case, this should be a very interesting debate indeed. Sources:(1) www.oshainfo.gatech.edu/teen-techguide1.pdf (WARNING: This is a PDF file. You'll need some form of reader to access it.)(2) http://www.youthrights.org...; second point(3)http://www.earlyamerica.com...(4)http://www.uvm.edu...