Three extra years at that age add some maturity/ life experience so 21 should be better than 18.
Actually 25 is the given age when a youth starts to mature mentally, though girls get there a few years earlier, so if we want to avoid emotional voters without much real life experience, 25 would be the better voting age. Nothing to do with fighting or dying.
18-year olds make the best soldiers and the worst drivers. They feel invincible and thus do things older minds would cringe at.
Perhaps the best way to analyze this would be to ask yourself if you would not mind being judged for a complex felony in a Superior Court of law by an 18-year old judge if he/she could be appointed to the bench that early and with only that much experience behind them.
This became very apparent in 1979 Iran when after the revolution, boys were allowed to vote in their earliest teens and make life and death decisions over others in those early ages.
More proof? Obama was elected by the youngest of our voters and least mature/educated (with some exceptions among Bush haters) many of whom were manipulated by trained Socialist/Radical operatives/ propagandists.
Our voters are amazingly naive as they have not come across the likes of Obama and his puppet masters. For those of us who have been involved in, confronted, politics in other countries, where people are naturally more skeptical of promises and authority, the readiness in America to believe the B.S. he threw at us - without defining anything but some undefined concept of “change” - which differed in his mind from ours. We heard what we wanted to hear and hoped we were right.
And could not bring any applicable life experience to bear to help assess WHAT Obama really was and planned to use against us. He was our first America hating “enemy within” of any consequence. Certainly in recent “post-Communism” times.
Thanks for the ping!
I would have made an outstanding judge at 18, because I was completely dedicated to life's intrinsic logic and its superiority to emotion.
I blame Mom's pre-natal X-rays.
I get your point, but I’m sorry. If you’re willing to ask a young man to die for you, the least you should be willing to also do is allow him to vote. Sure, young folk may well make bad decisions, but then again, so do much older folk (see Obama and his fellow socialists).
If they're old enough to die for their country, they're old enough to vote. We Americans are an aging population anyway.
How about raising the normal voting age to 21 (or 25), but extending franchise to citizens who enlist in (or are conscripted into) the armed forces beginning at the age of 18?