For her birthday, Nina Stanke gets 16 candles and the right to vote in Austria, the first EU nation to let 16-year-olds cast ballots in a national election.
Skeptics are grumbling, but the concept is generating some buzz in the US and in Britain, where one expert says voting rights “should be extended to all children.”
Austria lowered the minimum age from 18 to 16 for all elections last year, but tomorrow’s parliamentary poll will be the first opportunity for young teens to cast ballots nationwide.
A few other nations allow voting at 16, including Brazil and Cuba but Austria is the first of the 27 EU countries to do so.
Stanke, who turned 16 just this week, is one of up to 200,000 eligible Austrian teenagers — and she’s not about to pass up the opportunity to mark her birthday by wielding influence at the ballot box.
“Yes! I’m going to vote!” she said outside her Vienna high school.
But many don’t share her enthusiasm.
Gerald Hyman, a governance expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks it’s absurd to extend the vote to youngsters still in the throes of puberty.
“Sixteen-year-old kids are worried about whether they’re going to get their driver’s licenses,” he said on Thursday. “Do you consider them mature citizens? Citizens who are going to make up their minds about policy?”
Others insist that teens deserve a voice.
Proponents point out that in Austria, 16-year-olds can drink alcohol, even though they can’t drive or perform national military or community service until 18.
Stein Ringen, a professor of sociology and social policy at Green College, a graduate college of Britain’s Oxford University, believes the right to vote should be extended even to toddlers.
“For those children who cannot vote themselves, the mother should be the custodian of the vote,” Ringen said. “Children should have more sway in public policy ... 16-year-olds are knowledgeable enough to vote. There is no reason for any anxiety about giving them that authority.”
Dzamila Stehlikova, the Czech Republic’s human rights minister, says 16-year-olds should have the right to be heard at least in local elections. Empowering them, she says, would lower the crime rate, “and above all, the youth will feel that they belong to society.”
Austria’s stubbornly low birth rate and increasingly aging population have driven the debate.
Last year, the number of Austrians aged 65 and older exceeded the population aged 15 and under.
“What we have is an electorate that is growing older year by year,” said Christoph Hofinger, co-director of the SORA Institute for Social Research and Analysis. “Giving the 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote just helped maintain the balance between the generations.”
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