On November 21, the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts, voted in a town meeting to seek approval from the state to lower the voting age in town to 16 years old. The town voted 142-71 in favor of the measure.
If approved by the state, the new rule would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in municipal elections and, when registered, to become a town meeting member.
“These elections directly impact these young people,” said board member Raul Fernandez, a proponent of the lowered voting age.
“At the age of 16, they can start working and paying taxes on that work,” Fernandez explained. “There’s no reason why these young people should not have a say in our politics and actually giving them a say in our politics will make us even better.”
By that reasoning, shouldn’t 16-year-olds be allowed to join the military, use alcohol, and purchase tobacco as well? It’s odd that the people most in favor of letting children vote are often the ones who tend to put the most restrictions on those same youth.
The town will next send a Home Rule Petition — a request from a municipality to the state for some new type of local power — on to their representatives at the capital in Boston where the legislature would have to pass the measure in order to give Brookline the permission to allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections.
The nearby city of Somerville has also approved allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections and is waiting on their own Home Rule Petition to be approved by the state legislature. Other Massachusetts municipalities such as Concord and Northampton have also pursued legislation allowing 16-year-olds to vote. Organizations such as Vote16USA are pressing for younger people to vote, not only in Massachusetts, but all over the country.
In 2013, the City of Takoma Park, Maryland, became the first jurisdiction in the United States to allow citizens as young as 16 to vote in local elections. Hyattsville and Greenbelt, also in Maryland, have joined Takoma Park since then. The City of Berkeley in California also allows teens as young as 16 to vote but only in schoolboard elections.
The “Youth Suffrage” movement is gaining ground in the United States with Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang even endorsing it. “Squad” member in good standing Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) even introduced legislation back in March to lower the voting age at the federal level.
The one-page amendment had a simple message: “A State may not refuse to permit an individual to register to vote or vote in an election for Federal office held in the State on the grounds of the individual’s age if the individual will be at least 16 years of age on the date of the election.”
Thankfully, we’re not there yet. But what’s up with all the kid-voting advocacy?
Well, if you had any doubt on the subject, Pressley herself cleared it up back in March. “Our young people are at the forefront of some of the most existential crises facing our communities and our society at large,” Pressley said in a statement. “I believe that those who will inherit the nation we design here in Congress by virtue of our policies and authority should have a say in who represents them.”
In other words, Democrats are looking for more votes. High school-aged children, most still in those leftist indoctrination centers known as public schools, can be roused by leftist teachers and school administrators to go out and vote in favor of gun control and climate-change legislation. Oftentimes, polls are even located in those same schools — a ready-made left-wing vote factory.
Pressley, Yang, and others like to portray allowing children to vote as some sort of civil rights issue when it’s actually nothing but a vote grab.
The 26th Amendment, which lowered the minimum voting age in America from 21 to 18, was approved overwhelmingly in Congress and ratified by the requisite number of states by July 1 of the same year, the fastest an amendment to the Constitution has ever been ratified.
We can argue whether that was a good idea or not, but at least there was some reasoning behind it. Young men were being drafted to join the military at the time, and if those young men could be drafted and potentially sent to die for the country, many believed, they deserved the right to vote on whether U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a good policy.
No such conundrum exists now. The so-called Youth Suffrage movement of today has nothing to do with life-and-death issues. It’s nothing but a Democrat vote grab.
Photo: Juanmonino / iStock / Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
