{"id":362308,"date":"2018-05-22T16:54:44","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T15:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-not-let-six-year-olds-vote\/"},"modified":"2018-05-22T16:54:44","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T15:54:44","slug":"why-not-let-six-year-olds-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-not-let-six-year-olds-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Not Let Six-Year-Olds Vote?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits states from denying residents who have reached the age of eighteen the right to vote. It doesn\u2019t say that states can\u2019t set their voting ages lower than eighteen.<\/p>\n

The Amendment simply reads: \u201cThe right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of years ago, I saw where some people had come up with the bright idea of giving sixteen-year-olds the right to vote. Singer Michelle Blackwell<\/a> maintained at the time that \u201ca lot of young people feel very powerless and they don\u2019t feel that their voice matters and that\u2019s part of the reason why there might be this absence of young participation as adults.\u201d She believed that by lowering the voting age to sixteen more young people will pick up the voting habit.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t think much of this until I noticed recently that NPR\u2019s Michel Martin<\/a> was pushing the idea. She concluded:
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\nThe Free Society<\/a><\/span><\/span>
\nLaurence M. Vance<\/span>
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Eighteen-year-olds got the vote in 1971 in large part because of the Vietnam War. The feeling was that if these citizens were old enough to fight and die in Vietnam that they should be part of the conversation about what put them there. Well, teenagers today are dying, and they are fighting. How about letting them fight where it matters\u2014at the ballot box?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Martin then did an interview on All Things Considered<\/em> with Lorelei Vaisse<\/a>, who is on the youth advisory board for Vote16USA\u2014\u201can organization that is trying to lower the voting age in the United States to 16.\u201d Said Vaisse:<\/p>\n

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I have always been extremely interested in…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits states from denying residents who have reached the age of eighteen the right to vote. It doesn\u2019t say that states can\u2019t set their voting ages lower than eighteen. The Amendment simply reads: \u201cThe right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-362308","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}