After I turned 16, I ran over a stop sign with my dad’s car.
I was on the way to pick up tax forms at the post office, and after I bulldozed the road sign and called the cops on myself, I went inside to see if I could at least get the forms. That location didn’t have them.
This kind of foolishness is why lowering the voting age to 16, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supported last week, is a crazy idea. She’s backed lowering the voting age for years, and Congress just shot down an amendment to do so. Nevertheless, Pelosi advocated for the move.
“I think it’s really important to capture kids when they are in high school when they are interested in all of this, when they are learning about government, to be able to vote,” she said.
This is a terrible idea. Not every 16-year-old is out running over stop signs, but people under the age of 18 are in no way qualified to send politicians to Washington.
Pelosi, of course, wants to lower the voting age because the youth vote typically swings left. In the 2018 midterm elections, 67 percent of voters under 30 went for a House Democrat.
But your brain doesn’t fully develop until age 25, almost ten years after Pelosi wants a young person to start voting. Some students don’t take government classes until their senior year of high school, and we expect them to stop eating tide pods long enough to cast a ballot for president?
Other people on Twitter were equally astounded, and it looks like I wasn’t the only one making mistakes at 16.
when i was 16, my friends and i bought a live lobster, put it on a leash, and walked it around the neighborhood at 2am https://t.co/8NBuLTCjYu
— Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall) March 15, 2019
When I was 16, I sucked a drinking glass to my face for 10 minutes and gave my lower face a giant hickey that took 3 weeks to heal https://t.co/bE34w5soJv
— Kirsten Fleming (@KirFlem) March 16, 2019
When I was 16, my friends and I would buy mass amounts of hotdogs (specifically the red ones) and drove around populated areas to throw hotdogs at pedestrians. https://t.co/KKgxZJ960K
— Clout Wizard (@WhiteDad_) March 16, 2019
Nancy Pelosi: “we need to lower the voting age to 16”
16 year olds: pic.twitter.com/ShtbJJ7gy9
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 17, 2019
Changing the voting age also exposes the inanity of age restrictions on other activities. If 16-year-olds are old enough to vote, they’re certainly old enough, like 18-year-olds, to buy a beer. But lowering the drinking age from 21 won’t give more votes to Democrats.
[Read more: House rejects Democratic push to let 16-year-olds vote]
We’re in the age of youth activism, so of course they want to vote. Just last week, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her climate activism, which included Friday’s Youth Climate Strike. We should encourage this kind of initiative, where young people continue to engage with political issues.
We should give them time to learn, however, before handing them voting power. Kids who can barely drive are not ready for that.
