United States
In the United States, suffrage originally could not be denied on account of age only to those 21 years of age or older; this age is mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on July 1, 1971, lowered that age to 18. The primary impetus for this change was the fact that young men were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War before they were old enough to vote. There have been many proposals to lower the voting age even further. In 2004, California State Senator John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) proposed a youth suffrage constitutional amendment called Training Wheels for Citizenship that would give 14-year-olds a quarter vote, 16-year-olds a half vote, and 17-year-olds a full vote.
Read more about this topic: Youth Suffrage
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damn business.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,—
Nor speak with double tongue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)