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Civic Engagement - Votes for Eighteen-Year-Olds

The first chapter of our text goes a lot of different directions, but I want to focus on the

"Milestone" about Votes for Eighteen-Year-Olds.

Young Americans are often reluctant to become involved in traditional forms of political activity. They may believe politicians are not interested in what they have to say, or they may feel their votes do not matter. However, this attitude has not always prevailed. Indeed, today’s college students can vote because of the activism of college students in the 1960s. Most states at that time required citizens to be twenty-one years of age before they could vote in national elections. This angered many young people, especially young men who could be drafted to fight the war in Vietnam. They argued that it was unfair to deny eighteen-year-olds the right to vote for the people who had the power to send them to war. As a result, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age in national elections to eighteen, was ratified by the states and went into effect in 1971.

Interestingly, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment doesn't say a state can't let a younger person

vote. If you turn 18 during the summer of an election year, you can vote in the election in

November, but not the Primary elections Texas holds in March. That's like missing the

beginning of the movie! Primary elections are where the nominees for the November

election are chosen.

One idea that's been discussed in Texas is to let people vote in primary elections as long as

they're going to turn 18 in time for the November election. That would take a change to

the Texas Constitution, which can be proposed by our state legislature. The final decision

on changing the Texas Constitution, though, is solely up to Texas voters.

To change this would require an amendment to the Texas Constitution, which starts with a

joint resolution in either the Texas House of Representatives or the Senate. Last session,

S.J.R. 12 , by Senator Judith Zaffirini would have amended our state constitution to allow

17-year-olds to vote in party primary elections as long as they turned 18 by the date of the

November General Election.

Write a 2 - 5 page essay about this proposal. Who do you think would support or oppose

this? Is it a good idea? If you were in the Texas Legislature how would you vote? If it had

passed the legislature (it didn't...), would you vote for or against as a citizen?

Additional Resources

Here's the link to this session's H.J.R. 12:

https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=87R&Bill=SJR12

Here's a link to H.J.R. 37, a version of this from the 2019 session:

https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=86R&Bill=HJR37

This idea was first proposed in 2015 as H.J.R. 50. You can see how it did:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=84R&Bill=HJR50

If you look at the witness list from the hearing on H.J.R. 50, you can see who testified for

and against it:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/84R/witlistmtg/html/C2402015042014001.HTM

The National Youth Rights Association supports this:

http://www.youthrights.org/issues/voting-age/voting-age-status-report/

A group called FairVote supports this idea as well:

http://www.fairvote.org/primary_voting_at_age_17#facts_17_year_old_primary_voting