Rock the vote.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Youth activists are pushing to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. But is 16 just too young?

By the time you're 16, you can drive, work, pay taxes, and in some states be held responsible for adult criminal charges. So why shouldn't 16-year-olds be allowed to vote?

That's the question being asked by an increasing number of youth activists who are pressing their communities to lower the voting age.

"A lot of my friends are starting to get involved and aware of the world around them," says Sarah Leonard, a 10th-grader at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland, "but you can't do anything about it if you can't vote." Leonard, 15, was part of a group of young people in nearby Hyattsville that convinced the city council to allow 16-and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. When Hyattsville lowered its voting age from 18 in January, it joined another suburb of Washington, D.C., Takoma Park, which set the voting age at 16 in 2013.

"We can't say we want to hear their voices and want them to be more engaged but not do anything to engage them," says Patrick Paschall, a Hyattsville city councilman who sponsored the change to the city's charter to lower the voting age.

The last time the voting age was a big issue nationally was in 1971, when 18-year-olds were being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam three years before they were old enough to cast a ballot. The ratification that year of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age to 18 from 21 nationwide, giving 10 million more Americans the right to vote.

But some countries have opened their polls to even younger voters. Last year, 16- and 17-year-olds got to vote in Scotland's independence referendum, and 75 percent of them did so. (The referendum failed.) In 2007, Austria lowered its voting age to 16; Brazil and Nicaragua did so in the 1980s. In the U.S., 13 states allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they'll be 18 by Election Day (see map).

Now, more people are asking if the U.S. should go even further in allowing teens to vote. Would lowering the voting age help young people become regular voters? Would it increase voter turnout?

The U.S. trails most other wealthy industrialized nations in voter participation. In the 2014 midterms, only 36 percent of eligible voters went to the polls--the lowest turnout since World War II.

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