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Pros And Cons Of Lowering The Voting Age

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The proposal to change the voting age is nothing new. In the United States, this heated debate goes all the way back to WWII, coinciding with the decision by President Roosevelt to lower the draft age from 21 to 18. The response was overwhelmingly negative, sparking the slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” (Birnbaum 2020). At this time, the voting age was also 21. With the signing of the 26th amendment by President Nixon in 1971, the request to lower the voting age was approved and the debates died down - for a short time. Today, the proposal is to lower the voting age even further, from 18 to 16. If approved, this proposal would have many impacts across the country, changing everything from levels of civic engagement to the outcome …show more content…

Logically, lowering the voting age would result in at least a slight increase in voter turnout, simply because a wider amount of people would be able to vote. But it might not be as big of a change as some would expect or want. As seen throughout history, just because people are able to vote does not mean that they will vote. Through the course of several elections, the percentage of voters under 30 has fluctuated, ranging from 39% in 2016 to 50% in 2020 (Tufts, 2021). These fluctuations are caused by many factors, such as the competitiveness of the election, the level of the election, and the political views of the candidates (Frame, 2022). This means that the voting age is not the only factor in the voting turnout, and so changing the voting age would not definitively increase the civic participation of teens or the percentage of voters in the United States. However, this does not mean that lowering the voting age would not have any impact on these factors, either. As seen in recent years, the number of teen activists, teen civic participation and political engagement has been on the rise. This means that lowering the voting age is about as likely to have an impact on voter turnout in the United States as it is to have no effect or a limited

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