In my essay, I intend to show that lowering the voting age is not such a bad idea. My research shows that people consider lowering the voting age to be very bad. That they think terrible consequences will follow. My essay shows how this terrible consequence will not occur.
Terrible consequences? Like when women could vote?
People thought that terrible consequences would follow when women were allowed to vote. They thought a female president would follow, and yet it has never happened in America. In fact, when black people were allowed to vote, people thought it would be terrible and that a black president would soon be elected.
Younger people can be more easily manipulated
It is true that you can tap into the motivations and fears of younger people and manipulate them to do quite a bit. They have less life-experience and so are more easily manipulated.
Two terms of George Bush Jnr shows that adults can be manipulated
George Bush Jnr led the US to war in Afghanistan when Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan. He led the US people to a war in Iraq when there were no WMDs there, and told people he would fix America when instead he got North America into 14 trillion dollars of debt. All in all, this proves that adults are just as dumb and gullible as younger people are.
People would pander to the younger crowd
How hot a person is would start to matter in elections, and things such as lowering the tax of video games would become standard political pandering.
Politicians pander to people anyway
How would pandering to teens be any different to pandering to the elderly with more Medicare or pandering to homosexuals with promises of protection from Republican hatred?
Younger people have poor judgment
Young people have less life experience and often cannot judge the true consequences of their actions, which is why they appear to have poor judgment in many matters.
There are enough adults in debt and on drugs to surmise that adults have poor judgment
How can one say that adults are decidedly more mature and that they have better judgment when they make childish and outright stupid decisions all the time? There are plenty of younger people with better judgment than adults.
Younger people do not have adult priorities
Younger people do not have the worry of mortgages, older kids, debt and a whole host of other adult problems.
Younger people have their own priorities that are only exclusive if adults couldn’t vote
Younger people do not have these problems, but they have their own. The only way a teen’s priorities would be enacted unfairly is if adults stopped voting. Lowering the voting age simply means that teen priorities are given a fairer share of consideration.
Conclusion
Every argument given for not lowering the voting age has been challenged and I feel that lowering the voting age to somewhere in the teen age-range is a good idea. I feel that my essay shows this by debunking the arguments against lowering the voting age.
