The only way to begin is to look at the Constitution and its clarification of voting rights. The United States was the first democratic society to extend the right to vote to white males. The changes of the American voter begin here, with the blacks achieving the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in February of 1870. Woman suffrage followed, and women gained the right to vote according to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The final amendment added to the United States Constitution, in regards to voting rights, was the twenty-sixth; this amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.
This brings me to my main question: Why should the voting age be at the age of eighteen? I feel that the voting age in the country, which is presently at the age of eighteen, should be dropped to a younger age for a few reasons. First, youths are our future. Second, if laws pertain to us, why shouldn’t we have any say in what they are? Third, we are being educated and taught the system very early in our years of elementary school and high school, so why can’t we take part in it. Another argument for lowering the age is the fact that we can join our military at the age of seventeen, fight and die for our country, but we can’t vote. Furthermore, we can be charged in our court system as an adult for breaking the law at the age of seventeen. So it seems to me that we are only adults when it benefits our government, and when it doesn’t, we are just kids. For these reasons and more I feel the voting age should be lowered.
A serious trend that is receiving more and more notice is the declining level of voter turnout in presidential elections. "Although the U.S. government might not be actively denying any citizens their right to vote, except those that are under eighteen, it is extreme negligence that the right to vote is not being exercised." This is a very powerful statement, and most sixteen and seventeen year olds feel this way, according to an MTV survey taken in 1997. However, it is a statement that can be argued and verified by the distressing statistics that are showing up amongst the American voter. It is also a statement that is quickly becoming common, though, among those who take the time to realize that there is a growing problem in the political atmosphere of America. Politicians tend to pay far less attention to the youth of America; they have a tendency to target their campaigns to those being the older population. This creates a "catch-22" situation, in which politicians ignore young people because they don't' vote or can’t due to age, and young people that can vote don't vote because politicians ignore them. If the voting age was lowered to seventeen or sixteen say juniors in high school, for example, I believe you would find a much greater turnout for voting, and politicians would be much less likely to ignore real issues and quit hiding behind the media.