No Stupid Questions

In the USA, it was 21 until the 1970's. It got changed as people pointed out that you could be drafted and forced to die for your country at that age, but you couldn't help choose the people to make that decision. Given than 18 is the age when you legally become a legal adult, it was decided that 18 made a good age to gain the right to vote.

A major argument I've heard around it becoming younger is compulsory education. There is a fear, likely unjustified, that high school teachers would get a lot of control over part of the voting block since they would be able to tell students how to vote.

I live in a country that lowered the voting age to 16 in the 2000s, so I voted in my first election at the age of 16.

I don't think it changed very much at all, 16- and 17-year-olds aren't big enough of a demographic or vote in radically different ways from people slightly older than that.

FWIW, the UK currently has a bill in place that will lower the voting age to 16 before the next General Election (so, before Aug 2029).

I think it'll be a good thing. Young people are a good deal more aware of what's happening in the country than old people are. I mean, the current arrangement has stripped away the housing and career prospects of young people and brought us to the verge of fascism again.

What age would you want to vote? 16? 12? 5?

At some point you're too young to be able to follow and understand what's going on.

Yes, it makes sense that someone who is younger will be impacted more by today's decisions, but you also need to be mature enough to decide.

18 is the compromise age we have mostly collectively decided is the magic number.

The issue of when you are an adult is a trickier question than you might imagine. I have written in a previous answer about how children in North America would leave home around 13 or 14. There would be transitional spaces such as rooming houses or boarding houses before they were fully Independent, but they were fully functional "adults" by 15 or 16.

You can see this in the coming of age rituals for various cultures. The bar/bat mitzvah at age 13, the quinceanera at 15, the sweet sixteen for white folks. I do note that many of these are female centered and signal availability for dating/marriage. Boys just became men without much ceremony.

We still have a gradual introduction of rights and privileges with age. In my jurisdiction courts will consider a child's wishes in divorce starting at age eight. You can be charged with a crime at age 12, you can work for wages at 14, you can drive at 16, vote at 18. Alcohol consumption is 19 where I live but is 18 in many parts of the country.

So why 18? It matches up with other markers of maturation like graduation from high school. Could it be 17? Probably. Should it be 16? Possibly. But 18 used to be an age of independence. You could expect to be leaving home and starting a life separate from your parents. That has certainly changed. If we were to keep things in alignment maybe we should push the age back into the mid-20s? 😆

It used to be different for men and women too. That's after the women got the vote in the first place. Switzerland famously only did that in the 70s. With some women being against that. But I digress.

For men, voting age was closely linked to legal adulthood once it wasn't tied to land ownership or similar any more. Societies the world over have sort of agreed that 20-23 is about the age for that. With social progress since the 70s, it was lowered to 18. In the US because of Vietnam where 18yo were old enough to die senselessly in Nam but not old enough to elect the government that sent them there. That was unfair and addressed. In Europe, a lot of countries changed everything to 18 (drinking, voting, driving - don't do it in that order though) from the 60s onwards. And some subdivision elections (local or state level) are today from 16 in the EU.

So the question is more like why are you an adult at 18 as far as the law is concerned. That's a compromise societies have arrived at over time and often copied from one another.

A hundred years ago an argument could have been made for 16-year-olds being allowed to vote. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 following the First World War.

Today? Not a chance. High school kids can't be bothered to read two paragraphs for school, if they can read beyond a forth-grade level, that is. They get all of their information from social media, and are easily influenced by it.