Headlines Teenage (14-17) Voting Rights

[breakology]

I stumbled across this site earlier while searching google. It is a "Youth Rights" blog dealing with issues around lowering to the voting age.
There are actually some good points made in some of the articles I read, enough where I almost feel that lowering the voting age to 16 would'nt be that bad of an idea, and there is a really good argument for at least lowering the age to 17. 17 year olds can enlist in the military if they have parental consent, and that was the nearly same argument that was used to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 years ago. At the same time, it opens a pandora's box over issues dealing with being a "legal adult" that I don't think the judical system is ready to deal with.

There is huge difference between teenagers today, and teenagers 25 years ago. Maybe lowering the voting age could start a positive trend in citizen participation in local, state and fegeral elections. Maybe getting them started early will create more "awareness" in what goes on around them.

The issue definitly has it's positives and negatives, any comments? :question:

 

[ChilianFuckFace]

It all depends on how educated the kid is... One of my friend brother is still in high school. He is 17 years old. When I go by his house I see all of his little brother friend talking about the war, and how they want to join the marines to go kick some TERRORIST ass in Iraq... They are all so proud to be americans and blinded by hate. It is sad how this kids want to go fight for their country for a war which make no damm sense.

In the other hand, there a bunch of kids who all they want to do is smoke weed and could care less about the war. But then again, there are a bunch of adults who do the same.

The main problem I see, is that parents can easily persuade their kids to vote for what they believe.

I think, the age of 18 years old is good enough. Maybe when we prove our education system is a bit better, and people do not believe all the goverment says, we could work on this. For now, leave it as it is... we have enough ignorant voters already...

 

[bigck3000]

like he said, the door swings both ways...there are incredibly mature 17 year olds, and there are incredibly immature adults...i think "voting rights by age" is going to single out some potentially great decision makers, and allow certain other not-so-great ones to vote....some sort of test, but not an IQ or like test, i dont know...i would say, let the parents decide, but then you get the problem of parents dragging their 16 year old, out to vote for "who ever mommy says, and then she'll buy you a shiny new toy" type of shit. i have no idea.....fuck it lets just go back to letting rich white males deciding everything for us...that way we'll have someone to blame it on when everything gets fucked up.

 

[ChilianFuckFace]

....some sort of test, but not an IQ or like test, i dont know...

The state of FLORIDA can't handle the stress of voting, look at what happend on the 2000 elections, and stay tune for what is about to happen now. Putting yet more work on the voting system to come up with a test for teeagers would be a nightmare.

 

[tzedek]

Since public education is a big issue when it comes to politics, maybe the people who are actually in the public education thumbsdn: ) system should have a vote.