Should the voting age be 16? Have your say.

The UK government has announced all elections there will be open to 16 and 17 year-olds. Will New Zealand follow suit?

The UK government will lower the voting age across the board to 16. It’s already 16 in Scotland and Wales for devolved assemblies.

This reignites the debate in New Zealand, and I was invited to join Radio NZ’s The Panel with Wallace Chapman to discuss the matter (from 3’50” into the audio).

The voting age in New Zealand was originally 21. It was lowered to 20 in 1969 and then to 18 in 1974. Recently there’s been a campaign to make it 16. The present coalition government has dismissed a move to do so in local council elections, however.

What’s your opinion?

A lower voting age tends to be favoured more on the left. This is based on human rights and participation, but arguably it’s also because younger voters tend to be more left-leaning – although not universally. Getting young people into the habit of voting early on – and into the habit of voting, say, Labour or Green – may be an underlying political motive. Illustrating that point, it’s the UK Labour prime minister Keir Starmer who’s leading the change there. Does he see it as a way of boosting his party’s chances at the next election?

Political preferences can shift, the young are still impressionable, and the positions of political parties shift accordingly, so we shouldn’t assume that “demography is destiny” when it come to elections. In any case, the inclusion of 16–17 year-olds may not make all that much difference to any election, as that age cohort is still a minority and may not have a high turnout rate.

If lowering the age of eligibility added three percent of total voters, it would not make much difference to electoral outcomes, even if the young do have a greater preference for left-wing parties than older folks.

Improved voter turnout is one of the claims potentially in favour of going to 16. Some extra civics education and encouragement in schools to register as voters can be a stimulus to higher turnouts – and hence towards more democratically legitimate elections. But we don’t yet have enough experience to test the effect of this change on turnouts. Such changes can cause one-off boosts (as MMP did in 1996), with no long-term rise in participation.

Conservative readers may feel sceptical, on the other hand, about the readiness of 16 year-olds for the responsibilities of voting. And there’s so much propaganda and disinformation on social media, influencing impressionable minds, that young people – even before they turn 16 – would become targets for unscrupulous political actors. Why not leave them alone for a couple more years?

I haven’t taken a public stance one way or the other on this question. I did say on radio that I’d happily have voted when I was 16, if allowed. But I don’t recall thinking it unfair or wrong that I couldn’t. Many colleagues in political studies openly favour 16 as the age of eligibility. The 2023 Independent Electoral Review (pp. 173–81) gave this issue full consideration (for and against) and they recommended lowering the age to 16.

In 2022, the Supreme Court made a declaration that “the provisions of the Electoral Act 1993 and of the Local Electoral Act 2001 which provide for a minimum voting age of 18 years are inconsistent with the right in s 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 to be free from discrimination on the basis of age; these inconsistencies have not been justified in terms of s 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act”.

But s 12 of the NZ Bill of Rights Act affirms 18 as the age of eligibility to vote. So the Bill of Rights Act appears to be inconsistent with itself!

But the courts apply the laws that parliaments pass. It’s up to parliament to amend that section 12 and the relevant clause in the Electoral Act 1993, or not. And that won’t happen under the present government.