Life experience should be required

The argument

This argument holds that voting well requires a stock of experience that most sixteen-year-olds have not yet had the opportunity to acquire. By twenty, an average human being has typically experienced a lot more than the average teenager, and the difference is not simply a matter of years elapsed. Between the ages of 17 and 20 a young person must prepare incredibly quickly for the future ahead of them — essays, applications, resumes — and the shift from the shell of high school to adulthood happens very fast. What that transition supplies is first-hand contact with the systems a vote actually governs. Inside school, the structures that shape a young person's life are largely administered on their behalf; after it, they begin to encounter work, money, housing, and institutions directly, and to feel the consequences of decisions about them. Proponents argue that this is the difference between understanding how policies affect you and making assumptions about how they might. The second claim concerns the settling of views. The same years in which a person leaves school are when they are fully shaping and identifying their own views and opinions, often revising positions held earlier once those positions meet circumstances that test them. A vote cast before that process has run is, on this account, more likely to reflect the views of a household or a school environment than a settled judgement of the voter's own. By raising the age requirement, the argument concludes, voters would be able to become more well-rounded individuals who have both formed their own opinions and experienced the beginning of what adulthood is really like before contributing in a vote. That is why proponents of this position hold that life experience should be required, and that the age requirement should be raised.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many young adults have experienced things in this life that adults years older than them have never even heard of. Comparing experiences to the different age categories is not an accurate method of scoping out a proper minimum voting age requirement, as people can have different experiences and mature at wildly different ages.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] People gain life experience at different rates. [Rejecting P2] What one experiences shouldn't be required to vote.