On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, J.D. Giorgis wrote:
> I came across the following news item today, that a
> rather maverick lawmaker has proposed letting 14 year
> olds vote in Texas.
>
> http://www.dallasnews.com/politics/271862_gallery_26tex..html
I think that part of the motivation is that we've tried 14-year-olds as
adults, which is ludicrous considering that they can't vote. If you can't
vote, you shouldn't be charged as an adult for any crime, or so the
argument goes. I'm not sure that lowering it to 14 in one fell swoop is
the greatest idea; but passing some sort of law linking the age at which
you can be tried as an adult, PERIOD, to the voting age, isn't so bad; and
lowering the voting age a little at a time wouldn't be bad.
I shouldn't have been voting at 16, personally, but if it had been
allowed, I probably would have done things differently such that maybe I
should have been voting at that age. I certainly took it a lot more
seriously when I was 18, and did a lot more work to prepare myself for the
first election I could vote in than I had for any previous election where
I just had to worry about an essay or two, and if I got a
less-than-stellar grade on that sort of work, I could make up for it
easily with stuff that interested me more....
Julia
