Paul's Internet Landfill/ 2025/ Wishful Thinking 011: Lower the Voting Age

Wishful Thinking 011: Lower the Voting Age

We should lower the voting age. If I had my way we would lower the voting age from 18 to 14, but most activism around this issue advocates lowering the voting age to 16. I am okay with that.

The general principle is that most citizens should have the opportunity to vote in at least one election before they finish high school. Lowering the age to 16 will not get us all the way there -- most high school students graduate at age 17 -- but it will be a vast improvement over what we have now.

Sometimes I have ideas, and then I make the mistake of researching those ideas on the Internet. Usually that research indicates that my idea is stupid and the underlying issue is more complicated than I first thought. Thus far my experience has been the opposite. Lowering the voting age appears to have few disadvantages and many potential advantages. The arguments against lowering the voting age are mostly stupid. Like abolishing Daylight Savings Time, this seems like one of those initiatives that should have been carried out decades ago, but it still stubbornly hangs on despite multiple efforts to get it fixed.

  1. Wishful Thinking 011: Lower the Voting Age
    1. Mechanics of Change
    2. Arguments For Lowering the Voting Age
      1. High School Indoctrination
      2. Voting at 16 Doesn't Have Much Influence
      3. Voting at 16 Can Influence Policy
      4. Training Wheels
      5. Taxation Without Representation
      6. Voting Criteria Have Changed Before
    3. Arguments Against Lowering the Voting Age
      1. Adulting Thresholds
      2. Voter Immaturity
        1. Political Party Hypocrisy
      3. Left Wing Indoctrination
      4. Parental Coercion
      5. Little Prior Art
    4. Politics of Change
      1. Historical Attempts
    5. Followup Questions
  2. Sidebar!

Mechanics of Change

From what I can tell, we would need to change three pieces of legislation to change the voting age in Ontario.

Of course, to change provincial/territorial and municipal voting ages for other provinces, we would have to change different legislation.

School boards might have separate eligibility rules from municipal ones, but thus far I have not been able to tell.

We are not obligated to change the voting age for every level of government at once, although doing so simultaneously would reduce voter confusion and increase the probability that high school students would get to vote before they graduate. Personally I would be happy to get even one level of government's voting ages lowered to start.

Arguments For Lowering the Voting Age

In my research, a lot of the discussion about voting age is tied up in discussions of adulthood. We consider voting to be a privilege of adulthood, and then fight over whether the thresholds for that privilege should be 16 or 18 or 19 or 21.

The thrust of my argument is that voting is a privilege that (a) should be practiced with guidance, (b) does not have much direct individual consequence, (c) is best done before the large life transitions that many students undergo in their later teen years. Thus, I feel that 16 is a good threshold age even if it differs from the age of majority.

The underlying reasons I want to lower the voting age are (a) to get people voting in the more stable environment of highschool rather than after they have graduated, (b) to get people voting young in the hopes they will continue to vote, (c) to improve our democracy by expanding the franchise in a reasonable way.

High School Indoctrination

Some people accuse turnout nerds like me of trying to indoctrinate high school students. I am completely interested in indoctrinating high school students, but instead of a partisan indoctrination into whatever left-wing party the critics are worried about, I want to indoctrinate students into civic engagement.

I also acknowledge that everybody else also wants to indoctrinate kids with their pet causes, and that there is not enough classroom time to indoctrinate kids on every topic. But I think there are benefits to allowing students to vote while they are in high school even if there is no additional classroom curricula for such.

There is some evidence that people who don't vote during their first election continue not voting. The story is a little more complicated -- generally voting rates improve as people age, but there seems to be some reason to believe that cohorts of people who have high voting turnouts for their first election continue voting at higher rates than those cohorts that have low voting turnouts for their first election. (See the rows on Table 1 of this analysis -- in particular the 2006 cohort has continued to vote at a higher rate than cohorts either before or after). So if you can get many first-time voters engaged enough to vote in their first election, they might maintain that behaviour throughout the rest of their lives.

How does allowing high-school aged voters help? In Canada nobody can force you to vote, but high school is a strange place full of pressures. Some of those pressures come from peers (who might be enthusiastic about voting or might be "too cool to care"), some come from teachers and other authority figures, and some come from individuals as they struggle to figure out their identities. If there is effort to frame voting as a ritual of adulthood then more high school students might vote.

In Ontario, there is a Grade 10 Civics curriculum that includes elections in its materials. An Elections Ontario implementation includes a mock election. This course is not exclusively about elections (much of that material is in the Grade 5 curriculum!) but elections and government are covered in Grade 10 as well. Many students are in Grade 10 when they are 15 years old. Why make them wait until age 18 to participate in elections when they learn about elections much earlier? That's stupid. It would be better for more students to vote earlier. (Also note that the existence of this Civics curriculum puts the lie to the idea that students are too young and innocent to know about voting until they are 18.)

Many (although not all) students in high school are settled in the communities where they live. One huge disadvantage to having students vote at 18 is that many of those students will have graduated high school, and will have been uprooted to attend postsecondary institutions. They won't necessarily have the connections to their new (often temporary) communities to feel comfortable participating in elections there. In some sense this is a dumb argument for provincial and federal elections (among other things, students have the option of voting either in their current riding or their "home" riding) but it certainly affects municipal elections, and it certainly dissuades young people from voting because they feel they are not established enough to exercise their voting rights.

Moving away from home for postsecondary education hurts voter participation in another way. Many (although again not all) students have some stability and predictability living at home with their parents. Moving away for the first time is a strange and exhiliarating experience; inclinations to vote in elections can easily give way to other pressures. Furthermore, once kids move out they tend to be under less influence from their parents, which means those parents are less effective in encouraging their kids to vote.

Even outside of Grade 10 Civics class, there are many ways in which classroom activities can contribute to helping students through the voting process. Elections and voting will come up in other classroom discussions.

Even if students are not discussing elections in the classroom, you can be sure they will be discussed among peers. Whether inside or outside the classroom, one of the most important functions of high school discussions around elections come the day after the election. Many of us get caught up in election fever, confident that our preferred candidate/party will win. Then we vote and the next day we are shocked and dismayed to discover that a plurality of the voting public did not agree with us. That can really hurt, and it can be difficult to process all alone. Post-election classroom discussions can help students process those feelings, and help them understand that sometimes democracy means they don't always get their way. (In an ideal world, these discussions would also help convey the message that voting is still worthwhile even for those who lose, but maybe that is unrealistic.)

I am not claiming that voting while students are in high school solves all problems, or that every argument I make above apply to every student. What I am claiming is that allowing students to vote at age 16 provides a bigger window of support than keeping the voting age 18. The best way to get better at something is by practicing it, and giving high school students opportunities to vote while they are in high school offers greater opportunities for those students to learn how to democracy in a more supportive way than those who have graduated.

It is kind of bizarre. We teach math and reading and history and many other subjects because we want kids to get structured practice in those subjects. But when it comes to voting we are largely expected to get by on our own. Yes, there is the Grade 10 Civics class, but I would argue that is too far removed from the time when students can actually vote to be helpful.

Voting at 16 Doesn't Have Much Influence

This is going to seem weird as an argument for lowering the voting age, but hear me out: voting does not matter much in general, and the voting bloc consisting of 16 and 17 year olds matters much less still.

Very few individual votes actually change the outcome of an election. This is especially true in first-past-the-post, where so many votes don't help anybody get elected. Some critics fear that if you allow 16 year olds to vote, then there will be a wave of young electors that will overturn election results. Sometimes this is expressed as a fear that young people will cast their votes foolishly, and as a result we will elect foolish people and parties (as if older voters don't do that now).

I think these are not serious concerns. For any given election, there are not that many people who are 16 and 17 compared to the cohort of people who are older. There may be a few cases where some high school students organize waves of voting that change the outcome of elections (especially at the municipal level) but I expect this will be rare enough to be newsworthy.

My argument is that although voting is an important right, any individual vote does not matter much, and the collective votes of 16 and 17 year olds (or even 14-17 year olds) will probably not do much damage as compared to the votes of those who are 18 and older.

Voting at 16 Can Influence Policy

Even though the demographics of 16 and 17 year olds will not in themselves sway elections, they may well sway party platforms and policies. A vote is a threat, and political parties respond to those threats by creating policies that cater to those demographics. Lots of seniors vote, so policy platforms tend to favour seniors. Very few poor people vote, so poor people get ignored election after election.

Young people have concerns as well, but despite some promises around tuition (which are often promises aimed at the parents of young people) political parties do not cater to young people as a demographic. That is undemocratic. My hope would be that if more young people voted then political parties would cater to their needs more. This would be especially true if 16 and 17 year olds grew up to become stable cohorts of highly-engaged voters.

Training Wheels

Brazil has an interesting approach to voting. According to the ACE website their voting age is 16, but voting becomes mandatory at 18. I am not (today) claiming that we should make voting mandatory, but Brazil's approach suggests that there is an on-ramp to voting. Between 16 and 18 kids are able to try voting out, and by the time they become 18 it becomes a duty.

In a similar vein, I feel that one's first election can be a valuable training run. There are many aspects to this. One is the mechanics of voting: getting on the elector list, finding one's polling station, and casting a ballot. There are also the emotional rollercoaster issues I discussed above. A third has to do with understanding how elections (and politics!) actually work. If young people are (implicitly or explicitly) encouraged to vote by their high schools, their parents, and maybe their peers, then they can get more practice for that crucial first election. Even if they make "bad decisions" they can benefit from that practice.

Taxation Without Representation

This is an argument imported from the United States, and I am not sure I feel as strongly about it as I do about other arguments, but I will state it here as a possible tie between voting age and employment age. People are eligible to apply for a Social Insurance Number (SIN) from age 12 . People can work at many jobs from age 16, and may work part-time at earlier ages. That means they can earn money and can pay taxes. But they are not allowed to vote for their representatives. In some sense this feels like taxation without representation.

Some argue that these young people do have representation -- there are MPs and MPPs that supposedly represent their interests.

But we can make similar bad arguments that women should not have the vote. When people are contributing to society then do they deserve a voice in their democratic elections?

I think this argument has merit, but I do not feel it is watertight. For one thing, many young people do not work their first jobs until they are 18 or older. Secondly, some people never work at jobs and never pay taxes, but I would argue that these people still deserve to have voting rights.

As I argue below, there are all kinds of inconsistencies in the ages at which we consider people sufficiently adult to participate in society, and just because ages are different does not mean that there is an injustice. One might argue the same in this case. Having said that, even in socialist Canada we consider taxation without representation to be an injustice, so the age link may have merit here.

Voting Criteria Have Changed Before

The voting age was not always 18. It used to be 21, until 1970. It used to be the case that women were not allowed to vote and that indigenous people were not allowed to vote. As time passed we extended the franchise. We could extend it again.

Arguments Against Lowering the Voting Age

To be blunt, I have not found a single convincing argument against lowering the voting age to 16. There are a couple that sound reasonable at first, but applying just a little bit of critical thought makes them fall apart. If you disagree and have a convincing argument for why 18 year olds should be permitted to vote and 16 year olds should not, then I would be interested in hearing it.

Adulting Thresholds

The most common argument against lowering the voting age have to do with markers of adulthood. As one article against lowering the voting age in Wales

If 16-year-olds are old enough to vote, then we need to start considering other age thresholds – such as whether a 16-year-old should still be prohibited from serving on a jury, standing as a candidate in an election, driving, or buying an alcoholic drink.

No. This is stupid. There is no reason that lowering the voting age requires us to consider other age thresholds. This argument is stupid because we have an inconsistent basket of age thresholds separating children and adults, and there is no way to make this basket consistent. Why in the world is it okay for 16 year olds to drive cars but not vote until 18? If the expectation is that the only way we can lower the voting age is if we rationalize every other adulting threshold, we will never be able to change any adulting threshold, because the basket of age thresholds is inconsistent and makes no sense.

Maybe "makes no sense" is overly-strong language. These thresholds come about due to politics and historical baggage. Consider the legal age to consume marijuana once it was legalized. This is different in different provinces. In most cases it is set to 19 years old, which just happens to match the legal drinking age for most provinces. (Quebec is an exception here. The drinking age is 18 there but cannabis is prohibited to those under 21. Manitoba has a drinking age of 19 but a cannabis age of 18.)

There are arguments that weed affects developing young brains, and thus the threshold might better be set at age 25, after most people have developed their prefrontal cortexes. But this would not be feasible politically, so we have set the consumption age for weed at 19.

Lowering the voting age would also be a political decision, but in my view it would be better motivated than other adulting thresholds (such as marijuana consumption -- and for that matter alcohol consumption).

Let us also note that adulting thresholds vary across jurisdictions. Somehow kids in Quebec, Manitoba, and Alberta are much more sophisticated than we are, because they are allowed to drink at age 18. Similarly, the kids in most USA states are developmentally delayed, because their drinking age is 21. Are kids in Quebec, Ontario, and the USA that different that they have different developmental milestones? Not in my view. Through some convoluted historical and political process, we ended up at those thresholds without solid justifications for why one threshold is superior to another.

The reality is that different people mature at different ages, and furthermore expectations of maturity have changed as history has passed. It used to be acceptable to get married at 15; now most of us would think that is too young.

Uncle Wikipedia addresses the idea that adulting thresholds (what they call age of license) are allowed to differ from the age of majority. From its article on Age of Majority:

Many ages of license coincide with the age of majority to recognize the transition to legal adulthood, but they are nonetheless legally distinct concepts. One need not have attained the age of majority to have permission to exercise certain rights and responsibilities. Some ages of license may be higher, lower, or match the age of majority.

If you want to make the case that "changing age of license X means we also need to consider age of license Y" then you had better have a clear argument for why X and Y are related, and how changing the threshold for X affects Y. Arguing that X and Y are both things that have threshold ages ("Kids can't drive and kids can't vote!") is not sufficient.

Some guy named Colby Cosh tries to make this argument with respect to the voting age and the age of majority in criminal cases:

And why cling to the Young Offenders’ Act? In our country, 16-year-olds can commit crimes of the most ferocious brutality under a seal of eternal anonymity: it is accepted that they are not yet fully responsible citizens, and that they are generally deserving of diminished punishment. Does anyone ever propose a trade? I for one would be happy to join the crusade for age-16 voting if young offender laws ceased to apply at 16 rather than at 18, or were simply thrown in the trash. Let the chariot of revolution pop wheelies upon the shattered remains of all odious age distinctions!

But this is a dumb argument. Yes, in this case there is some relationship between X (the age at which somebody can cast a vote) and Y (the age at which one is tried as an adult in criminal court) but that does not mean only people who can be tried as adults should be able to cast votes. For one thing, voting is not the same thing as committing a crime. They are pretty different things! They require different levels of judgment and responsibility, and they have different consequences on both the individuals involved, and on society as a whole.

Secondly, there are lots of people who effectively cannot be tried as adults in court who are still allowed to vote. Sometimes people who are tried in courts have their charges dismissed because they are crazy and deemed not criminally responsible for their actions. If those people are over 18 years of age, they are still allowed to cast votes!

A third argument has the flavor that because 16 and 17 year olds cannot be held accountable to adult laws, they can make all kinds of stupid rules that will harm adults, but which will not affect the 16 and 17 year olds. That is not really true (it is our representatives who make the laws, not the 16 year olds directly), but even if that was the case then it is also the case that many 16 year olds live long enough to reach age 18, at which case the stupid rules they helped create by voting will also apply to them.

Voter Immaturity

Some people argue that 16 year olds should not be able to vote because they have insufficiently-developed brains. As Andrew Coyne writes in a paywalled article:

Advocates for lowering the voting age argue that children of 16 are as capable as adults of making complex decisions about the government of the country.

Like many other Canadians, I inexplicably have a lot of time for Andrew Coyne, but he is way off base here. In addition to bringing up the "oh noes there is an inconsistent basket of age thresholds" argument, he makes it sound as if voting is a "complex decision" that requires great capability. He says that 18 year olds don't have sufficiently developed cortexes, and thus we should raise the voting age to 25. He is being facetious, but he is also way off base.

First of all, voting is not all that complex a decision. You decide some criteria on which you will make a decision, and then you cast a ballot accordingly, or you stay home and don't vote. You can make that decision complicated if you want, but you don't need to.

People cast their votes for all kinds of reasons, many of them dumb. People might cast their vote in support of a local candidate, in support of a party leader, or in support of a political party. Under first-past-the-post, only one of these reasons is actually correct, but we consider it socially acceptable for full-grown adults to cast their votes for the other reasons. People are allowed to cast votes for whatever reasons they want, and we do not hold any voter to any criteria about casting votes wisely -- so many adults don't cast votes wisely.

Similarly, we do not have any criteria for judging that voters over the age of 18 have "developed enough" to cast a vote. Some voters have this capability and some don't. Some voters have intellectual disabilities. Some voters have dementia. They are still allowed to vote, and I argue that they probably should be allowed to vote.

I do not quibble that some 16 and 17 year olds are not mature enough to cast votes wisely. That will be true regardless of what age we choose as the threshold for voting. But choosing 16 (or 14) as the threshold makes sense to me because in my opinion a large enough fraction of 14 year olds do have enough maturity to hold political opinions, and that is the only criterion you need in order to cast an informed ballot.

I am by no means arguing that all those 16 (or 14) year olds will cast sensible ballots, or vote for the "right" reasons. Some of them will vote for meme parties. So what? When I was in high school I strongly supported the NDP, but I am better now. Some people will be damaged by having bad first voting experiences (which is why electoral aftercare is helpful) but many more will cast stupid ballots when young and then smarten up as they gain experience.

Political Party Hypocrisy

As always, political parties illustrate just how hypocritical this argument about how stupid this "16 year olds aren't mature enough to vote" argument is. Both the Federal Liberals and the Federal Conservatives permit membership at (wait for it) age 14, and those members are allowed to participate in leadership convention voting. (Furthermore, they extend the franchise to permanent residents, which is yet another hypocrisy.)

I would argue that voting for the leader of either the federal Liberal or Conservative party is a far more consequential decision than a regular elector casting a ballot on voting day. With very high probability, the leader of one of these two parties will become the prime minister of Canada. Regular electors don't get to choose the next prime minister of Canada; they just vote for a local MP. So the members of these political parties have at least as important a decision to make as regular voters (and some might argue more important).

Secondly, voting for a party leader has more impact than casting a ballot for a local MP, because there is a smaller elector pool in a political party leadership race than there is for a general election. That means each individual vote counts more. That is compounded because (hypocrisy again) none of the major political parties choose their party leaders via first-past-the-post. They use (sometimes multi-round) alternative vote, which means fewer of those votes are wasted. So 14 year old voters casting ballots for political party leadership are making a more important decision, and having more influence in their vote. We are fine with such 14 year olds having the franchise, but we are not okay with 16 year olds in the general public having a less consequential and less influential role in general elections? It is utter hypocrisy.

Left Wing Indoctrination

There is some worry that those socialist high school teachers will influence impressionable young minds to vote for socialist parties, and then those poor children will be socialist for the rest of their days.

First of all, I think this will be largely false. Some teachers might advocate for particular political parties, but from my time as an instructor I can confidently say that most teachers will understand the difference between advocating for participating in a system and directing their students to vote in particular ways.

But let's say I am wrong, and lowering the vote to age 16 will cause a wave of socialist indoctrination from high school. So what? It may be the case that people who start voting young keep voting, but it is not the case that people maintain the same voting habits throughout life. "If you are not a socialist at age 20 you have no heart; if you are not a conservative at age 40 you have no brain" is a cliche for a reason: many people grow more conservative as they age. Let the youngs vote for the NDP or Greens; they'll come to their senses later on.

Parental Coercion

There is an argument that if you allow young people to vote then they will be coerced into voting for the same political parties their parents support. This would make JD Vance happy, but I do not see it as a serious threat. For one thing, you can make the same argument for why women should not be allowed to vote -- their husbands can dictate the vote they should cast. Secondly, we (mostly, with a few glaring exceptions) have a secret ballot. A young person can enter a voting booth, cast their ballot in secret, and then lie to their parents. Thirdly, by the age of 16 many young people are well into their rebellious phases, and some will cast ballots to cancel out those of their parents out of spite.

Say that some parents coerce their children to vote in a particular way. Why would that stop at age 18? If it does stop then those children will be more motivated to vote with independent minds than before, because they experienced coercion. If it does not stop then the problem was not related to lowering the voting age.

If coercive voting is widespread, that is definitely a problem we should address. Mail in ballots are one of those glaring exceptions we should possibly address. But I think that is not closely related to lowering the voting age, because (as I argue above) there are not that many people between the ages of 16-18 to make a huge difference in elections.

Little Prior Art

One criticism of lowering the voting age is that most countries have not done so, and those that have do not make very good company. From the ACE Electoral Project the following countries have voting ages set to 16:

and the following have voting ages at 17:

Being in the same company as Iran and North Korea is bad optics, but just because undemocratic countries have low voting ages does not mean that lowering our voting age will also make us undemocratic. If we seriously discuss the prospect of lowering the voting age, then I expect this argument to come up frequently. But it will be a stupid one.

Politics of Change

The main avenue for change in Canada appears to be the Vote 16 advocacy group. They held a conference in 2024 and were active in previous voting age attempts. I feel that joining forces with them is probably the most effective course of action.

As with all these wishful thinking entries, I am now supposed to say what I am willing to contribute to these efforts. The realistic answer is: nothing. I am through with contributing to things. But I think that if people are interested in making a contribution, allying with Vote 16 is the way to go.

One problem with this issue is that it appeals most to people who are too young and poor to have much political power. If rich adults could take up this cause it might be able to build up the political power necessary to succeed.

Historical Attempts

This issue comes up every few years, and every few years it is struck down. Here are some of the attempts I have read about:

Followup Questions