Journalist Calls for ‘Changing Voting Age to 0’ — Uses Childhood Essay to Prove How Smart She Was

A liberal journalist has made the progressive case for lowering the voting age to 0 and allowing felons to vote.

Kelsey Piper, a staff writer at Vox’s Future Perfect, argued for enfranchising 75 million Americans in a piece published last week. Piper’s proposal echoed a similar one made by liberal Vox colleague Matt Yglesias in 2015.

Not only is eradicating the voting age “the right thing to do,” Piper writes, but doing so could “lead to a more engaged, more informed electorate that can at last do right by some of its most vulnerable constituents.”

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According to Piper, proposals such as one made by Andrew Yang, who favors pushing the voting age back to 16, do not go far enough.

In her estimation, it is readily apparent that kids are “competent” to fight for a better system than the one she claims is failing them. Referencing America’s voting history – from “white land-owning men” to women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement – Piper draws a parallel between past “expansions of voting rights” and her present-day proposal to eradicate the voting age.

“Many of these expansions of voting rights were bitterly opposed at the time. In hindsight, they are all clearly moral and necessary,” she wrote.

Piper lays out four reasons justifying why we should get rid of the voting age, including that the concept of a voting age is “unprincipled” and that letting kids vote will “turn young people into better citizens.”

She also anticipates critics who say letting children vote is harmful because they are likely to be misinformed voters. Piper references one of her own essays on the New Deal, written when she was 12, to make the case that young people can be responsible voters.

Based on her essay, Piper says she “would’ve been a pretty responsible voter, or at least no less capable than the average citizen.”

“[A] lot of people underestimate how informed kids can be,” she writes.

The reaction to Kelsey Piper’s proposal on Twitter

Several commenters found Piper’s argument absurd and weren’t shy about expressing the sentiment on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TFinn82/status/1171438099944984576?s=20

“You can kill them one day before birth, but you should give them the right to vote one day after. The left in 2019 ladies and gentlemen,” wrote one commenter in response to a link shared to Piper’s piece by Vox.

Three year old vote pic.twitter.com/q7y7ezd8XF

— Brandon 🛸 (@br4nd032) September 10, 2019

“Teenagers are too dumb to avoid candy flavored nicotine but we should let 4 year olds determine their own stance on complex issues like the Economy and Geopolitics is the perfect Vox argument,” quipped one Twitter user.

And still another commenter tweeted: “Okay, but only if we can set the minimum wage at the same level.”

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In March, 125 House Democrats and one House Republican voted in favor of legislation that aimed to lower the federal voting age from 18 to 16. The bill failed to pass by a margin of 126-305.

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