The arguments for and against lowering the voting age in the UK fall on partisan lines.

Even to the most mildly cynical observers, it’s pretty obvious that this is all about hard-nosed electioneering. The Left push the agenda because they want to get more voters and win elections. The Right block it because they, too, want to win elections, which generally involves the other side losing. Nobody moves an inch.

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Judging from the reactions we’ve had on Reddit to this discussion, this pattern isn’t confined to the UK.

We brought it up because it was meant to come up in Parliament. On May 11th 2018, a private member’s bill sponsored by the decidedly fresh-faced Labour & Co-op MP Jim McMahon was supposed to have its second reading in Parliament but was faced with many hours of objections, mostly from Conservative MPs, so it was tabled. It is expected to come back around in October 26th. It proposed lowering the voting age to 16.

If you look through the Hansard report or just read the comments this episode has generated you’ll see a lot of arguments that are probably very familiar. 16 years olds can’t be trusted to do anything, let alone vote. 16 year olds are uninformed, they don’t read the news or engage with local issues so their vote would be meaningless. The counter argument to both points is, well, who is really engaged in politics enough to qualify for the vote? And what’s more, 16 year olds are considered adults in some other ways already — they can join the army, get married, pay taxes — so it’s only fair to give them a ballot.

Nobody. Moves. An. Inch.



Because young people have been earmarked as dyed in the wool lefties, neither side of the debate is ready to drop them, either through greed or fear. But that entrenched position ignores the facts.

Way back in the distant past when Facebook was a force for good and Donald Trump was a merely an averagely successful reality TV star, British people spent all their time fretting about a referendum. (Time is a flat circle).

The 2014 Scottish referendum was the first major election that allowed 16 year olds to participate, and participate they did. 75% of 16 and 17 year old first time voters turned out. Researchers at the LSE found they were highly mobilized and deeply engaged with politics even before the vote. With turnout across Europe dwindling, there is an argument that we simply need more bodies to make democracies work — get young people in and see the numbers go up.

Not only did they turn up in great numbers, they spent a lot of time researching who they should vote for. They actually looked at a wider range of sources than older voters. It convinced Ruth Davidson that the voting age should come down permanently. Similar studies in Austria and the US have found that younger voters are no more partisan than older voters.

Some went for the new demagogues on the left or right, but not more so than older voters. In fact, they are likely to be more open to new ideas, less stuck in their ways, and that suggests that the conception of a monolithic youth vote always voting for leftist parties is dubious.

If the problem is that people aren’t informed enough to vote, I cannot see how an age limit makes much of a difference. We know that there are ranks of organisations whose business models are based to some extent on misinformation. Social media platforms are guilty of manipulation (effective or otherwise) but the tabloid press has been doing the same thing for decades. It’d be churlish to suggest digital native 16 year olds are worse equipped to deal with the modern information environment than the generations that are struggling to adapt to it.

Jim McMahon’s postponed bill didn’t just propose to lowering the voting age in the UK to 16. It contained added provisions to enroll 15–17 year olds to vote and included “Citizenship and the Constitution Education” as a required topic in schools. Those sound like more effective measures against misinformed voters than blocking the injection of youthful energy into the electoral process.

Let’s not forget, Corbyn’s much vaunted youthquake ended up being very disputed. It didn’t sweep him to power in the General or Local Elections either. The reason the right fears lowering the voting age in the UK is because they aren’t very appealing to the young — but that’s a choice they’ve made, not some immutable law of nature.

If you want young people to vote for you, try writing some policies for them. Get them excited about your vision for the country. Don’t halfheartedly try to bring them onside with memes and then spend hours filibustering a bill that would let more of them vote. In short: try harder.

You know the drill:

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