Name: NewsNight 'Off Menu:' Should the US take a hint from the UK & lower the voting age?
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T18:16:27.000Z
Duration: 8 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Across the pond, teens who are not old enough to drive will now be old enough to vote.

The U.K. has lowered their voting age to 16 years old.

Modal verbs - A2

So this could be something that the U.S. could consider or not.

You can't even, you're not even old enough to buy a drink, a glass of wine, but you're going to make an important decision on your nation's future.

I know Labor's probably doing it because they're hoping young people tend to be more liberal, but look at our last presidential election.

Young women were for Harris by a 14-point margin, 17-point margin, but young men were for Donald Trump by a 14-point margin.

But young people are doing a lot of things in this country at 16, at 15, at all kinds of young ages.

I think about the Department of Labor, I was chief of staff there, we fined Packer Sanitation Services in Wisconsin because they had 102 children, 13 to 17 years old, overnight shift operating saws to process meat.

And so Donald Trump is now proposing to cut the Department of Labor budget.

The Job Corps, which is an entire training system, 25,000 young people are about to lose their training.

So if they're old enough to do this kind of work, I think it's worth considering whether they should be allowed to have a say on who's going to regulate the system in which they're working in.  And I think that if we're going to start treating children like adults more and more as we have in this country, then giving them a say, and these kids aren't the same, they're not the kids that I were.

They grew up a lot more, they're a lot more politically savvy, they're a lot more in tune with what's going on.

A lot of young people under 25, a quarterback in a lot of these protests and movements that we're seeing happening across the nation right now.

It's not going to be any worse than anybody else that's ill-informed.

I mean, there's some 50-year-olds who I'm not sure should have the right to vote.

I mean, I'm kind of torn on this because on the one hand, their brains are definitely not developed.

But on the other hand, I mean, maybe they should have a sense of responsibility at an early age.

Maybe they should understand how laws work and how they affect them, especially if they're already out in the world working.

Well, my message to the politicians is be careful what you wish for.

But my message to the young people who might like this idea is, look at my face, bags under my eyes, thinning hair.

This is what happens when you're inundated with political messaging.

The mailing, the texts, the emails, live your life as long as you can, folks.

But the way that we do it in this country is crazy.

And yeah, I mean, if you're sort of like inundating people with this toxicity at 15 or 16, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, you can give young people in America the right to vote.

They don't have the attention span or the patience.

They're not going to go sit in no eight-hour line with no, you can't even get water.

It's illegal to give him a snack while he's standing there.

So I don't even know how much this would swing elections one way or the other, even if we were to open it up to 16-year-olds.

I mean, it takes a couple people getting the sniffles and staying home because they need Kleenex to swing an election.

I think Kelly's also right that, you know, everybody's like, oh, young people are so liberal, but sometimes they're not.

And so you can't really typecast them that way and say this is a bad idea because maybe it might give one party an advantage over another.

I think we're deluding ourselves if we don't think that they are already a part of this system, right?

I mean, all of the things that we're talking about, climate change, all of it, these are going to disproportionately affect that population.

I mean, wouldn't it be great if they, and again, not everybody graduates high school, but wouldn't it be great if people at least were old enough to have had a high school education before we let them vote?

But we say that they are old enough to work the vast majority of work functions.

I mean, they're having taxes withheld from their paychecks if they're working at McDonald's at 16.

So yeah, I mean, maybe they should have a say in who's taxing them and why.

What if it's only young people that work at factories illegally on a third shift and those are the ones we let vote?

The ones who- And you show your pay stub from working at the- I'm being silly.

I mean, one of the other things is that there are some studies that suggest that the earlier you allow people to vote or the earlier people do exercise their right to vote, the more civically engaged they are in their whole lives, which this country has such low civic participation in elections.

We really do need to figure out some way to deal with that.

Or at least some people think that you need to figure it out.

I think there should be more people voting and maybe this is one way to do it.

I'm a huge proponent for civic engagement and civic education.

They may have to recalibrate curriculum to make sure that the education comes earlier in middle school so they understand the branches of government, the separation of powers and all that.

And I also always say this is, you know, I'm 42 so I'm nowhere close to these 16 year olds who are potentially running or voting, but I don't see young people as the next generation.

But to your point, there are plenty of ways to get involved that don't require casting a ballot.

I mean, if they are involved, why should they not be casting a ballot?

Well, where do you draw the line though, Abby?

I mean, you know, I see people at protests and other things, you know, young teenagers, maybe 12 year olds, should they have the vote?

Maybe this is the sort of like, if you can drive, you can vote type of situation.

Just similarly, if you can, you know, be conscripted into military service, you should be able to  I don't know.

It seems to me a reasonable, and again, this is something that I think is a conversation we should continue to have, but it seems to be a reasonable standard that if you can serve and work in this economy, that you should have a right to have a say on who's leading the economy.

I do think to, just to be devil's advocate on it, I do think that there is a potential where if you're inviting people to be a part of a system that is already questionable and they already view as not necessarily completely beneficial, then you're creating voter apathy a lot sooner in these people.

So if I'm voting at, you get your vote at 18, you get your vote at 24, and somewhere around 28, 30, you kind of go, all right, nothing changed.

Whereas now if you're voting at 16, that same voter might tail off early to mid-20s instead of early to mid-30s.

So you may create an electorate that is less interested in politics as a whole.  What?

Well, I mean, what you said, Pete, earlier about how, you know, maybe civic education needs to start earlier.

I'm like, there are so many old people who have absolutely no idea how our system of government works, and they just get to automatically vote.

Some of them are literally in government, and they still don't understand how it works.

And they just get their right to vote automatically, then they don't need to be quizzed on whether they understand the system.

I think the bigger issue is that this should be a, can you vote test?

So if you're 11 and you understand how the government, well, I don't know, listen.

But to your point, this system is broken, right?

Voters have an average of 20% or so voter participation.

You know, it is really sad how few people exercise their right.

Now, some of that could be because the candidates aren't compelling people, but I think trying new things to get people to participate and be a part of our system, I think, is something that is worth exploring.