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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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Because working with direct supervision is a far cry from making decisions that affect everyone.
I have a 16yo, bless her heart. No way is she ready to vote. I'd far rather not tax children than give them access to running anything connected to law.
Part of the reason 18yos are "ready" to vote is they ostensibly have a couple years of working under their belt. 16yo have no idea how disconnected from reality they really are. Give them a couple more years to operate under responsibilities, first.
I know part of parenting is that constant trade off of allowing a child to express themselves and enforcing boundaries they may not yet understand, and so preventing problems for the future by way of boundary enforcement, but voting in local elections and school boards and things that impact them seems like relatively low consequence.
The worst case scenario is that teenagers become the most active voters that need to be courted by potential school board candidates, who then propose policies that are actually harmful to teens but seem attractive to them, e.g., canceling school more or similar. And that seems fairly low risk considering that they're outnumbered by adults, so they would need a substantial block of adult voters that agree as well. I think it's a decent introduction to voting, with consequences for actions, but with a limited scale and scope that would do well for them.
Thinking about the issues on my local ballot in recent years, it's things like library funding, police funding, school board and town council reps, judges, and otherwise appointing adults or approving bonds that have been requested by adults. I think teenagers could have valuable input on those.
I'm with some of the others in the thread. If they're trusted to drive, to work, to be tried as an adult for crimes, they should get a say in management. Otherwise raise driving age and working age to 18 and be done with it.