Lower the voting age to 16?

There is a move afoot in San Francisco to allow 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in local elections.  It prompted Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to write “Will the kiddie vote rock San Francisco?”  Personally, I don’t think so.  Here’s why:

Despite the national coverage urging 18 to 20-year-olds to vote for the first time in 1972, only one in five cast a presidential ballot.  That said, I don’t believe people need to worry about 16 and 17-year-olds playing a deciding factor in municipal campaigns now.
 
{mosads}Voter apathy among 18 to 20-year-olds is much the same today as it was when I first studied the issue 40 years ago.  I say this after watching my two youngest children, now 20 and 22, take their high school civics classes.

In 1975, years before Hollywood discovered “Rock the Vote,” I established the California Voter Group.  The goal of the statewide, nonprofit organization was to motivate high school juniors and seniors to register to vote when they turned 18.  In order to accomplish this goal, we created internships in lawmakers’ offices and then asked these same students to lead peer seminars on their high school campuses.  Our underlying assumption was this:  If you can show young people how dynamic and interesting politics is, then they will want to participate in the process when they become old enough to vote.

You know the old saying “Actions speak louder than words?”  In the case of voter turnout, it’s absolutely true.  Ask yourself this simple question:  Would you rather read about civics or would you prefer to be out in the world actually experiencing it?  Baseball players don’t simply read about their craft, they practice it every day.  Ditto for video game designers, musicians, chefs or pilots.  There’s just so much you can get from a book.  The rest you have to learn by doing.  Why should voting be any different?

Just in case you think all those high school civics books we make students read are relevant, guess again.  Back in the day, California Voter Group wanted to know which books were being used in classrooms.  We polled 100 teachers in six counties.  The results were shocking.  One headline read, “Civics books flunk exam.”  That’s because many of the books students were reading in the late 1970s were published in the mid-1960s (when I was in high school).  No wonder teenagers didn’t like politics.  They felt no personal connection to the topic.

If I had to guess, I’d say the vast majority of young people growing up in the ’70s rarely vote today as adults.  If my theory is correct, then it’s no wonder 18 to 20-year-olds now are just as apathetic as their parents were then.

Does anyone think 16 and 17-year-old voters will behave any differently?

Freidenrich writes from Laguna Beach, California.  He served as a congressional staff assistant on Capitol HIll in 1972.