Voting At Sixteen
The SNP conference has voted to support lowering the voting age to 16. I don’t think that this is a good idea at all. Eighteen is the right age for the franchise to be bestowed. Sixteen is simply too young. At sixteen you are usually still in compulsory schooling, so you certainly can’t be claimed to have reached maturity or adulthood.
As Andrew Allison points out, the law is confused. The legal age at which you can buy cigarettes was recently raised to 18, for one thing. You have to be 18 to be able to legally drink alcohol. You can’t marry without the consent of your parent or guardian until 18. You can’t drive until you are 17. Pretty much the only thing that you can do at 16 that you couldn’t before is have sex.
If the voting age was to be lowered to 16, it would make a mockery of every single age-restricting law that prevented sixteen year-olds from doing anything. How is it possible to claim that sixteen year olds are mature enough to vote, yet not to drink or smoke? if you support lowering the voting age to sixteen, you must also support lowering of every other age restriction to sixteen. Otherwise you simply are a hypocrite.
Source: BBC
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