Voting at 16?

Well I haven't posted for a while. I've been working crazy hours (shh don't tell my union... seriously, please don't tell them), behind in both of my distance ed classes, and I seem to be going out every day to do at least something, not including Sundays - not religious, I just like sleep. I cannot wait for this freaking annual report to be done and get to working normal union hours for 'the Province'...

So I am hearing renewed debate about lowering the voting age to 16. This is another issue where I am on the fence, but I am leaning towards letting it go lower. Why 16, why not 15, or 17, or 14? No idea... I guess 16 you can drive, which I guess was also arbitrary to set driving age to this. So any arguments I present will be for just making voter age lower, why is it specifically 16 though is beyond me.

Well a thing that worries many conservatives about lowering the voting age is that the 16 year olds would just vote NDP/Liberal. This is hard to give any good stats on this, but I will use some anecdotal evidence here. When I was in grade 12 during the 2000 election, we had the candidates come to my high school for a debate. I was not at this debate as I was gone to Calgary on an accounting competition (yep, I was for sure cool in high school!), but I did hear that the NDP candidate said he was very pro legalization of marijuana. So when we had our school mock election, NDP won. For those of you that don't know, I went to high school in Lethbridge, Alberta. Mormons were about 30-40% of my school (guessing), and they are a very conservative group, yet NDP was still able to overcome. This showed me that 16 year olds, on average, have nothing better to worry about than whether then can legally smoke up. This is not to say that because you are in a certain demographic that happens to vote a certain way you should discounted, but rather that if the most pressing issue in your life is whether the cops can charge you or not for hotboxing your car at Henderson Lake, maybe you shouldn't be deciding the fiscal, monetary, international relations, etc. policies for our country!

To argue this point, you can probably claim that only the more politically involved 16 & 17 year olds would be going to the polls to vote. For instance, the voting was done in Social Studies classes, my Honours/Advanced Placement class voted in Canadian Alliance (side note: proves that as intelligence goes up, so does your likelihood to vote conservative), and we would have been the ones that are more likely take the initiative to actually go to the polls.
[Aside] In this very class, a fellow blogger that happens to be sharing this blog with me... not to name names... voted LIBERAL in this mock election. [/Aside]

Someone arguing back would then say that even though majority of high school students wouldn't care about voting, teachers may actually take students to voting booths! Many schools actually host polling stations, it wouldn't surprise me if teachers took their classes down the gym/library and made them vote.

So that's the internal argument that is going on in my head. I want to encourage youth to participate if they understand the process/issues, but not the moronic youth that I went to high school with. Allowing voting at 16 may have the effect of making people at a younger age more politically aware since what they think may actually matter. Voting in a mock election should not stress anyone since it simply doesn't matter, but if you are voting in the real deal, many will take that responsibility more seriously.