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A Campaign to Lower the Voting Age to 16

By Miranda Rosenberg

Miranda Rosenberg says her teachers have been supportive of her effort to lower Florida's voting age to 16.
The beginning of my sophomore year, my dad asked me to sign a tax form for the $30 I owed the government as income tax on my part-time job. It didn't seem right to me: If I'm paying taxes, shouldn't I have a say in the system I'm paying into? This is taxation without representation!

In theory, I've got representation via my parents, but there does not seem to be much we agree on lately. So why should my voice be silenced just because I am some 550 days shy of 18?

I decided it was time for a change. In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the national voting age to 18 from 21. I found out that states have the power to lower the voting age, but there are no states in which all 16- or 17-year-olds are allowed to vote.

In Florida, citizens can petition to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot, which can be approved by majority vote. If I can collect 488,722 signatures (8 percent of the number of Floridians who voted in the last presidential election), the voters will decide whether to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote. And since I live in a state where voters last year approved a constitutional amendment that protects pregnant pigs, an amendment lowering the voting age does not seem quite so foolish.

So where does that leave me right now? Faced with the daunting task of collecting nearly half a million signatures. As of December, I've got about 2,000. Media attention has helped me gain recognition, but it has not collected signatures for me.

I've gotten lots of people to sign at local colleges and political groups. I've also created a Web site, VoteAt16.com, to make the petition available for anyone to download. But I've encountered the same problem women faced when they fought for suffrage at the beginning of the last century. (The 19th Amendment gave women the vote in 1920.) Only those who already have the right to vote can sign the petition. And while most of my peers think it's a really cool idea, lowering the voting age isn't such a cool idea to a lot of adults who remember the reason Palm Beach County gained electoral infamy four years ago: the notorious presidential election, with all those pregnant and dimpled chads. But if the adults couldn't get it right then, why not let 16- and 17-year-olds give it a try?

I've given speeches to local political groups, and I even got to be on a national radio show. All the attention was a bit overwhelming at first, but now I like it. It has, however, occurred to me that I might turn 18 before I'm able to collect enough signatures to put this on the ballot. But at least then I'd be able to vote for it.