Pop quiz: Should teens vote?

What do you think? I certainly have my own opinion, which I'll share later. For now, I'm curious to hear from you!

The other day I woke up and saw an email with the following subject line: “Should teens vote?”

I looked a bit more closely and saw that it was the daily morning newsletter sent out by The New York Times.

You may have heard that Britain has extended the franchise to 16 and 17-year olds.

This follows a few other nations who have also lowered the voting age: Brazil, Austria, Argentina and Malta have all done this in the past and according to The Times, “Germany and Belgium decided to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in some elections but not others.”

Here’s a graphic that shows what the voting age is in different countries around the world.

I have strong feelings about this, and I am going to write about my answer to this question later, giving my opinion and my reasoning.

First, however, I thought it would be interesting to send this out to you and ask you all to think about it.

According to The Times, there are three reasons that governments might consider lowering the voting age.