Welcome to Kid News Convotes. I'm Mark Curtis, a longtime political reporter and a board member of Kid News.

Today we're going to discuss the concept of lowering the voting age from its current status of 18 years old.

My guest is Dr. Valerie Endress, Professor of Political Communication at Rhode Island College.

She is also one of the leaders of the

nationwide American Democracy Project, which tries to get people engaged civically at a younger age.

Thanks for joining me, Professor. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here, Mark. Well, we are

longtime colleagues when I was a reporter in Rhode Island, so this is exciting. This fall, this November,

voters are going to the polls in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. At the same time,

there are efforts going on across this country as well as other nations around the world

to lower the voting age to 16. Why do you think this is happening?

You know, there's a number of surveys out

there and one that really captures my interest was done by a professor at Harvard University.

And it was all about youth and what they think about politics. And one of the things that he said is that he believes

this generation is the century's greatest generation. And part of the reason that he thinks this

is that Gen Z is all about and motivated by protecting rights like clean air and clean water, school safety,

all of those issues. And so one of the things that we've seen is that there's a bit of an uptick

in voting, but there's more of an uptick in community engagement. That is, they don't just want to vote. They

want to do something. And sometimes that means that we have students as young as 14, 15 years old

that are starting their own nonprofits. They're not waiting for the adults to do something. And so this generation,

and he argues this, I think pretty convincingly, is different from previous generations.

It's interesting. I should mention the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Brazil, and Argentina

are among those who have already lowered their voting age to 16.

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