The Fifteen-Year-Old Question

La Verda Aliro and Movado Esperanto-Civitana have jointly proposed lowering the federal voting age from eighteen to fifteen. The amendment sits before the Constitutional Committee. It has gathered 18,000 signatures toward a citizen-initiated referendum; the threshold is 50,000. On its surface, the proposal is modest—a three-year shift in a single threshold. Beneath the surface lies a harder question about what we owe to those who will inherit what we decide.

The case for lowering the age has a clarity to it. A fifteen-year-old who works part-time is taxed on her wages. A fifteen-year-old who attends school is shaped by federal education policy. A fifteen-year-old who will live for another seventy years in the Republic will bear the consequences of fiscal choices, climate commitments, and constitutional amendments that the Assembly makes today. The argument that taxation without representation is unjust does not suddenly become invalid at age seventeen. If anything, it gains force when the person taxed will live longest with the results.

The objections are also real. Political maturity is not a function of age alone; it is a function of experience, information, and the capacity to weigh competing goods. A fifteen-year-old's brain is still forming. The Assembly has a duty not to expand the franchise recklessly. Yet these concerns cut both ways. We do not revoke the vote from citizens whose judgment we question on other grounds. We do not require a literacy test or a civics examination. The question is not whether fifteen-year-olds are perfect voters. It is whether they are worse voters than we are, and whether the answer is so obvious that we should exclude them from the conversation about their own futures.

The Constitutional Committee will hear testimony. The citizen petition may yet reach the threshold. But the Assembly should approach this amendment without the defensive crouch that has marked our recent constitutional debates. We are a federation founded on the principle that a person who chooses to belong to us deserves to be heard. A fifteen-year-old who has lived her entire life in the Republic, who works and pays taxes and will live with our choices for decades, has made that choice as truly as anyone. Whether we lower the age or not, we should do so with eyes open to what we are saying about who counts as part of us.