Busting the myths on a lower voting age

The debate about lowering the voting age has exploded into living rooms around the country this week following a technical decision by the Supreme Court.

Almost immediately the question has become polarised along party lines, in ways that are very different from New Zealand’s political history, where generally the left and the right have supported opportunities for more young people to vote and seeing it as a positive step.

This week the New Zealand Supreme Court found in support of the teen lobby group Make It 16’s claim that there is an inconsistency between the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 and the Electoral Act 1993 and Local Electoral Act 2001. The Government has signalled it will respond by putting the question of the age of voting to parliament.

It’s unlikely 16-year-olds will be voting in the country’s general elections any time soon, as changes to the voting age require a super-majority support from 75% of all MPs. But there is a very real possibility that the voting age may be lowered for local government elections as this only needs 51% support in parliament.

The standard arguments against lowering the voting age almost always speak to what young people are assumed not to have, or be able to do. It’s common to hear they are not mature enough because their brains are still developing. Our brains do develop rapidly until our mid-20s. However, as leading adolescent neurologists like Professor Sara Johnson from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have shown, this also means young people can learn more quickly. Yet we don’t presume to deny older people, who may struggle with processing large amounts of new information, the right to vote.

Another common objection is that lowering the vote will advantage progressive rather than conservative parties. However, youth voters in recent international elections have cast votes right and left. In fact, young voters tend to switch parties more often than older voters to support policies that favour their long-term interests. As our population ages, our electoral decision-making horizon is becoming shorter, favouring those who are older and will benefit in the short term. One way to get a longer view in policymaking is to appeal to voters who will be alive long enough to bear the direct impact of decisions made today.

There are also ongoing complaints that youth show no interest in politics, don’t understand the issues and don’t understand civics. Yet we only need to look to the thousands of young people who took to the streets to protest climate change as evidence that many youth are interested in the big issues of the day.

Research also indicates that when 16- or 17-year-olds cast a vote, they are more likely to continue to vote into the future. Enabling younger people to vote not only increases turnout, it is also correlated with other prosocial behaviours including volunteering.

Finally, we often hear the concern that childhoods should be protected from making big life decisions. Yet in reality, New Zealand has no fixed age of majority. From 14 years, a ‘‘young person’’, can be held criminally responsible and at 16 can apply for a firearms licence, leave school, and agree to or refuse medical treatment, pay tax and work full time.

As UK Liberal Democratic Peer Sir Norman Lamb put it, the decision to enfranchise 16 to 17-year-olds is not a decision about when one becomes an adult, but a decision about who is able to have a voice in the process of determining the nation’s future direction. This is perhaps the most compelling reason to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, for they will inherit the consequences of the decisions we make today for their whole lives.

To get a longer view in policy-making is to appeal to voters who will be alive long enough to bear the direct impact of decisions made today.