Youth suffrage, or children's suffrage, is the right of youth to vote and forms part of the broader youth rights movement. Until recently Iran had a voting age of 15; Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua have a voting age of 16; and Greece, Indonesia, East Timor, Sudan, and Seychelles have a voting age of 17.^[1]

United States

In the United States, suffrage originally could not be denied on account of age only to those 21 years of age or older; this age is mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on July 1, 1971, lowered that age to 18. The primary impetus for this change was the fact that young men were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War before they were old enough to vote. There have been many proposals to lower the voting age even further. In 2004, California State Senator John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) proposed a youth suffrage constitutional amendment called Training Wheels for Citizenship that would give 14-year-olds a quarter vote, 16-year-olds a half vote, and 17-year-olds a full vote.^[2]

In 2013, Takoma Park, Maryland became the first U.S. city to allow 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote.^[3][4] On January 5, 2015, Hyattsville, Maryland joined Takoma Park in lowering the voting age to 16.^[5] On 8 January 2018, the Greenbelt, Maryland's city council voted unanimously to approve a measure lowering the voting age to 16, in local elections.^[6]

On 8 November 2016, voters in the City of Berkeley, California approved Measure Y1 with 70.31% of the vote, giving the city council authority to lower the voting age to 16, for school board elections.^[7] In May of 2020, Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan authored Oakland Measure QQ, which proposed lowering the voting age to 16, for school board elections.^[8] The Oakland City Council voted unanimously to put this measure on the ballot.^[9] On 6 November 2020, the city of Oakland, California voted to pass Oakland Measure QQ, making Oakland the largest United States city to partially enfranchise sixteen year old voters.^[10][11] This ballot measure passed with 67.88% of the vote.^[12]

In 2016, San Francisco, California voted against Proposition F, which would have lowered the voting age to 16 for local elections, by a 4.2% margin.^[13] During the 2020 elections, San Francisco voters rejected Proposition G, which lowered the voting age to 16 for local elections and ballot measures.^[14] Proposition G failed by a 1.6% margin.

Venezuela

A proposal to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 was defeated in the 2007 Venezuelan constitutional referendum.

Arguments for and against youth suffrage

Arguments for

• People of all ages are required to pay income and sales taxes; therefore, denying them the right to vote is taxation without representation.^[15]
• Youths are legally permitted to have sex^[16] or drive a car in some countries, which may be more dangerous and difficult than voting.^[15]
• Voter turnout among youth will improve if young people get in the habit of voting before they reach 18 and go to colleges far away from their state of residency, like it did in Germany when some states lowered their voting age for municipal elections.^[17]
• Education for and about democracy would be better served if there were no voting age.^[18]
• Government entitlements suppress fertility, which means the youth demographic is systematically suppressed, with no political power to offset the effect.^[19]
• Governments derive their just authority from the consent of the governed. To be legitimate, those who govern and those who legislate must be elected by the people, not a special subset of the people, such as those over the age of X years.

Arguments against

• Some youth are believed by some to not to have sufficient understanding of the realities of life to participate in voting.^[20]

Impact

Studies have found no differences in the quality of young voters' voting choices relative to older voters.^[21][22]

A study of preregistration (registering individuals before they are eligible to vote) found that it was linked to higher youth turnout, and that politicians became more responsive to issues that the young have strong preferences on, such as higher education spending.^[23] One study found that allowing 16-year-olds to vote led those voters to have "substantially higher levels of engagement with representative democracy (through voting) as well as other forms of political participation".^[24][25]

Demeny voting

Demeny voting is the idea that parents would cast votes on behalf of their children thereby ensuring that the interests of children were properly accounted for in the voting system. Most young people do not support themselves financially and are reliant upon parents for support, thus parental voting power should be proportionate to the number of dependents, especially where government benefits are concerned, to appropriately counterbalance the interests of the childless.^[26] Essentially, a case for "no taxation without representation." However, as children and their parents often have differing political, social, and economic interests, it is doubtful demeny voting would result in any significant advances of youth interests in government.^{[citation needed]}