Middle Schoolers try to Lower Voting Age

From The West Wing (Season 6, Episode 17)

Categories:

Run time: 0:51

Clip Description: In this clip dealing with the power of the right to vote in shaping politics, White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler comes across a group of articulate middle school students touring the White House. They passionately debate Toby about voting age requirements and successfully win him over to their side by advocating for a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to 16.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip discusses the concepts of voting age, electorate concerns and Constitutional Amendments.

Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip teaches about voting, elections and the Constitutional Amendments founded by our Founding Fathers.

Discussion Questions

The 26th Amendment set the age at 18 in 1971, faster than any amendment has been ratified before or since, largely on the argument that someone old enough to be drafted is old enough to vote. That is an argument about a particular burden of citizenship, not about maturity. If the case for 18 was never really about cognitive capacity, what is the case for stopping there — and what would an argument for 16 have to establish that “they’re mature enough” does not?
In 1970 the Court held in Oregon v. Mitchell that Congress could set the voting age at 18 for federal elections but not for state and local ones — which is exactly why an amendment followed a year later. Apply that today: could Congress lower the voting age by statute, or would it take an amendment? And what does your answer tell you about who really controls who votes in a federal system?
You are close enough to the age in question to test this on yourself rather than in the abstract. Set aside whether 16-year-olds should vote and ask whether at 16 you would have wanted to, and what it would have taken for you to cast a vote you would still defend. Does your answer point to a rule about age, or to a rule about something else we currently use age as a stand-in for?

Assignment

Draft an actual constitutional amendment on voting age — a sentence or two, written in the register of the existing amendments — and then write two pages on how you would get it ratified. Article V requires two-thirds of both chambers and three-fourths of the states; name the states you would expect to be hardest and say why. Then do the part most students skip: work out who would gain and lose seats if the electorate grew by two years’ worth of voters, and be honest about whether that, rather than any argument about maturity, is what would actually decide the question.

For AP Students

AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 5: Political Participation

Topics: 5.1 Voting Rights and Models of Voting Behavior; reaches 1.9 on the amendment process
Skill: Argumentation
Anchors: Twenty-Sixth Amendment; Fifteenth, Nineteenth and Twenty-Fourth Amendments

A group of middle schoolers argues Toby Ziegler into supporting a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to sixteen, and wins. The students in the scene are roughly the age of the students watching it, which is not a small advantage. The franchise has been expanded four times by amendment, and this is a live argument about a fifth.

Discussion questions

The voting age went from twenty-one to eighteen by constitutional amendment in 1971. Explain why that took an amendment rather than an ordinary statute.
Name the strongest argument for sixteen and the strongest argument against. You have to give both before you say which one you hold.
Every expansion of the franchise has been resisted with the claim that the new voters are not ready for it. Does that pattern settle the question, or could the argument be right this time?

Short activity

Draft the amendment (15 minutes). Students write, in one sentence, the text of a Twenty-Eighth Amendment lowering the voting age. Underneath it they list the two thresholds it would have to clear to be ratified, and state in one sentence which of the two would kill it. The numbers have to be exact: two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, then three-quarters of the states. Students who have only ever heard that amending the Constitution is hard find out here precisely where the difficulty sits.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.