Starting this year, thousands of teenagers in Colorado are now eligible to vote at the age of 17. The “Colorado Votes Act” allows 17-year-olds to vote in primary elections as long as they’ll turn 18 by the general election.
While Democrats masked this initiative in the name of youth civic engagement, their true intentions are to gain a political advantage and it could not be more obvious.
Let’s not be fooled – most of Democrats' push for election law reform is not to help the supposed “disenfranchised” voter, but in fact it is to help themselves and make it easier for liberals to win elections.
This stands true for lowering the voting age.
Democrats are not so much interested in young people’s participation, as they are interested in the left-leaning votes those young people cast.
Attorney Rick Wagner points out that this new law is “unnecessary, expensive and with a poorly hidden partisan agenda.” (emphasis added)
The necessity for this step and cost to Colorado's county clerks — all of whom opposed the notion — is remarkably unconvincing.
The offered reasons, such as getting young people to participate in the process earlier, aren't the driving forces behind the legislation. It's the belief among progressives that the younger the voter, the more likely they are to vote for the progressive agenda.
Wagner calls out Democrats' actual motivation in “expanding” voting rights to new groups…
If you examine the most hunted groups for voting reform by progressives, you'll find they are increasingly the young and inexperienced, those new to the country or convicted felons who previously were not allowed to vote.
If someone is trying to build a platform supported by those constituencies, it suggests that they're putting forth ideas that are not supported by the mainstream voter and are reduced to recruiting support from those who don't know any better or who have a long history of poor choices.
It’s no secret that younger people lean more progressive. Therefore, in liberals’ minds - the more teenage voters there are, the more Democrat voters there are. It’s purely political.
The Pew Foundation recently completed a study on the political views of younger teens - ages 13-21…
Only 30 percent of these younger Generation Zers approve of President Trump’s job performance... More striking, perhaps, 70 percent of them believe the government should do more, not less…
They believe blacks are treated unfairly and that gender designations should be handled very differently. Of all age groups, they are the most pessimistic about the direction of the country.
David Davenport pokes holes in the left’s argument that “more civic engagement will improve civic education” for our nation’s youth. (emphasis added)
Sen. Harriette Chandler, D-Mass., said, “We signed a bill last year that provides civic education. This is just a continuation of that.” While we’re at it, let’s let more people perform surgery so they can learn to be doctors.
Reminding us that no argument is too silly for an academic, professor David Runciman, head of the Department of Politics and History at Cambridge, says we should let kids vote at age six.
In the teen years, let’s keep the horse of civic education ahead of the cart of civic engagement and voting. There will be plenty of time and opportunity for that later.
“With only 23 percent of students scoring as ‘proficient’ or higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress government tests” – perhaps our efforts should be more focused on civic education and better preparing America’s future voters.
Simply put: lowering the voting age is nothing more than a political strategy for Democrats to pony up more votes. It's a win for Democrats, not democracy.