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Voting and Candidacy Age
The Electoral Commission is the independent organisation established to help Parliament and Government modernise elections and get more people using their vote. In October 2003 the Electoral Commission invited HeadsUp students to contribute to a review of the minimum voting and candidacy ages, which was then going to be handed to the Government to help them decide what action to take. Did you take part?
The HeadsUp Forum was called 'Make Your Mark'. At the end the forum came down in favour of dropping the voting age to 16 (from 18) but was against lowering the age that people could stand as candidates (21). These conclusions were fed into the the Commission's review, which was finally published in April 2004.
In their report on the age of electoral majority, the Commission recommended that, for the time being, the voting age should stay the same but the candidacy age should be lowered. Now we need to wait to see what the Government will do.
In the meantime, Tony Bellringer, who led the review, wanted to give you some feedback on how the review process went and where your comments on HeadsUp were used...
Dear HeadsUp,
"The Electoral Commission believes that young people bring a unique perspective to politics, one that forces decision makers to look at how they get their messages across and make themselves understood.
The decision to review the age at which people can vote and stand as a candidate in elections was to largely inspired by young people themselves. The young people involved in the Yvote?/Ynot? Project undertaken by the Children and Young People's Unit in 2001, made a direct recommendation to the Commission to "seriously consider the arguments for lowering the voting age".
The views of young people seemed to be very mixed with many young people feeling ready to be given the right to vote, but just as many not wanting the voting age to be lowered. The mixture of feeling was clear in the HeadsUp forum itself, where the numbers of people 'for' and 'against' lowering the voting age were roughly the same.
Some people have taken our recommendation not to lower the voting age at this stage as the Commission telling young people their views don't count. In fact the decision not to recommend lowering the voting age was made only after carefully looking at the views of all age groups both below the current voting age and above who responded to our consultation. The Commission did a number of things during the consultation phase of the review to specifically get the views of young people, so we could take them into account in reaching our conclusions.
The Commission's report points out that if certain things changed enough in the next few years lowering the voting age could become much more realistic. Mainly, in our opinion, if citizenship teaching in schools greatly improves during that time.
The HeadsUp forum was a great source of young peoples' thoughts, feelings and ideas, as can be seen by the number of quotes we used in the final report. Thanks to all those who responded to our consultation through the HeadsUp forum, we hope you'll stay in touch and continue to share your views.
All the best,
Tony Bellringer
Age of Electoral Majority Review Manager"