“A student-led campaign has persuaded the Cambridge City Council to lower its voting age to 17, the first city to do so, according to supporters.
“The measure, approved 8-1 on Monday, would only apply to Cambridge elections. It still must be approved by the state legislature, which could give the city permission through a ‘home-rule’ petition,” the AP reports.
‘This is a way to revitalize democracy and turn around plummeting voter rates,’ said Paul Heintz, 17, a co-chairman of the Campaign for Democratic Future.
[…] Students can understand politics, but aren’t interested because they can’t participate, said Jesse Baer, 17, a co-chairman of the campaign. The right to vote would spark an interest, he said.
‘Teachers and the principal and superintendent are all interested a curriculum that ends with a vote,’ Baer said. ‘It creates a real hands-on education, a real lasting way of keeping kids interested.’
“And besides,” Baer added, “by the time we all hit eighteen, we’ll be so busy renting porn that politics won’t much matter to any of us anyhow.”
Notes the high-energy seventeen-year old, “I mean, porn really rocks, y’know?”
Ah, The People’s Republic of Cambridge. Our emphatic “YES!” answer to that age old question – is there a place on earth nuttier than Bezerkley? Hey, at least this is better than when Ben And Jerry’s helped to try and pass a law allowing non-citizens to vote.
Hey, kids, vote early and vote often…
Myria
Heh. Need to hear Kinen and Yglesias’s thoughts on this.
By the way, I don’t mind if non-citizens vote. Really. Just so long as the votes don’t count, that is…
Sure it may seem silly, but practically it’s no big deal. From my daily encounters with Cambridge, there aren’t that many high school students anyway. In fact you can check out the demographics <a href=”http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/~CDD/data/2001cambridgeprofile.pdf”>here</a>. Assuming that those 9322 kids between 5-17 are equally distributed, that means a whopping 776 potential voters have been added out of a population of about 88,000 people of voting age. If young people really wanted to make a splash, college students at MIT, Harvard, Lesley, etc. would register to vote in Cambridge. Now that would be something.
I’m all for doing away with voting age requirements, and starting an ‘intelgence’ test before you can vote (who are the candidates, what country are we bombing the living daylights out of and why, why do we all hate the French, you know those kind a kind of questions – nothing to do with orthography). Some 12 year olds know more about the world than those of voting age…that is my two cents at least.
I sure do hope you meant “intelligence” test, Matthew…
Now, off to the airport to pick up the wife—who’d better have brought me back some bratwurst.
that was a joke Jeff