Summary: Lowering The Voting Age To 18

As the United States has grown from a small, agrarian nation of 2.5 million men and women to a burgeoning superpower of more than 300 million, a great transformation has ensued: Suffrage has expanded from only land-owning white Protestant men to all Americans, regardless of skin, gender, or creed, above the age of 18. Indeed, the massive growth of liberty which has occurred since 1776 is one of our nation’s proudest achievements. But this great national mission has not reached its conclusion, for younger Americans are denied the ability to influence the government’s agenda. For a land conceived in freedom to further realize the democratic ideal it has yearned and shed blood for, it is essential that we take a novel step forward: Lowering the voting age to 16. …show more content…
The basic principles our Founders sought to ground the American experiment on—citizens deciding how they would be governed, leaders subservient to their populaces—depends upon every person the government affects having a voice. Because those below 18 are barred from voting, young people oftentimes feel disenfranchised. They aren’t incorrect in that feeling: It is hard to have no say in how the ship of state is steered when we are hurt by every school budget cut, every elimination of an afterschool program, every step the government doesn’t take to invest in the future young people will inherit. It is fundamentally unfair that we the quality of our schools, the health of our environment, the richness of our opportunity depend upon a government that doesn’t have to listen to