California Poised to Lower Voting Age to 17

Expect 17 year olds to be voting in California’s 2020 election. A new bill, ACA 8, just introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, will amend the state constitution to lower the voting age from 18 to 17. Having kids vote is ridiculous, but in California these days, ridiculous is the new normal. And it’s easy enough to understand what’s really behind this: California’s youth tend to vote for Democrats, so lowering the voting age means more Democrats get elected. The youth vote made the difference in several close races in California last November.

For example, in Orange County, 45th Congressional District incumbent Republican Mimi Walters was upset by 12,523 votes. Nearly half of that margin of victory came from just six precincts in and around UC Irvine, where Democratic challenger Katie Porter received 93 percent of all votes cast, 5,300 votes more than Walters received.

It should come as no surprise that college students favor Democrats. For a taste of what they’re perpetually exposed to, have a look at this “electionlawblog,” authored by a UC Irvine professor, “generously supported by” the UCI School of Law. Amid post after post with anti-Trump, anti-GOP headlines, you’ll scroll long and hard to find content critical of Democrats.

Back in August, 2018, the Sacramento Bee ran a story, Billionaire, unions have a plan to tip California’s closest congressional races. That headline says it all. Billionaire donors in California – Tom Steyer in this case – don’t just give more money to Democrats than Republicans, their money is supplemented by the infrastructure of the public employee unions, invariably supportive of Democrats. In California alone, these government unions collect and spend over $800 million per year, enough to pay for a standing army of political operatives. These professionals are deployed statewide, backed up by politically active union volunteers who, if they’re Democrats, are recruited and plugged into the machine. The Republicans aren’t just outspent, they have no comparable organization.

As for that plan to “tip California’s closest races,” it’s hard to imagine how the Democrats could have done any better. In November 2018, California Democrats flipped seven Congressional Seats, and saw their supermajority (holding 2 out of every 3 seats) in both houses of the state legislature grow to a “mega-majority” (holding 3 out of every 4 seats). In the higher state offices, Democratic candidates ran the table.

Critical to the Democrat strategy was reaching out to young voters. On college campuses across California, turnout was up, padding the Democratic victories. Overall, the youth vote in California tripled compared to the most recent midterm election, moving from 8 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2018.

The Democrats have done a lot to rig elections in their favor in California. If there is a constituency that leans Democrat, the Democratic machine will find them. That’s why the Democrats who control the state legislature passed three laws in advance of the 2018 election, all designed to stack the deck against Republicans.

First came the Motor Voter law. This meant that as soon as any California resident acquired or renewed their driver’s license or state ID, they would be registered to vote automatically. Second, the state legislature authorized counties to automatically send absentee ballots to voters, even if they had not requested those ballots. Third, the rules governing ballot custody were changed so that anyone could turn in absentee ballots, not just the actual voter.

Democrats Rule the Universities, Now They’re Going for the High Schools

Along with harvesting the votes of every thoroughly indoctrinated college undergraduate, California’s Democrats now intend to harvest the votes of high school students. These 17 year olds are the perfect targets. Their entire K-12 experience in the public schools has been exposure to a nonstop tirade against “rich, racist, sexist Republicans.” With even less life experience than college students – who themselves often have yet to experience the real world – they are ideal candidates to become new Democratic voters.

Democrats have paved the way for minors to turn out to vote in great numbers. They have already legalized pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. And just in case these youthful voters exercise youthful irresponsibility and don’t remember until the last minute to vote, California’s legislature has passed a law that requires a mailed ballot merely to be postmarked by election day. They have also permitted “conditional ballots,” wherein an unregistered voter can decide on election day to vote, and they will be simultaneously registered and handed a ballot.

One has to wonder why the Democrats care. They already have their mega-majorities in California. But they’re not done. Party insiders reveal Democrats are setting their sites in 2020 on unseating another half-dozen Republican incumbents in the state senate and state assembly, and at least three more Republican Congressmen, Doug LaMalfa (1st District, northeast corner of CA), Tom McClintock (4th District, Central Sierra and foothills), and Paul Cook (8th District, Southern Sierra and southeast).

Here’s a counter-proposal to Assemblyman Low’s new proposal. The chances anyone in the state legislature will consider this counter-proposal are zero, but it’s worth putting out there because it’s just so sensible. Why not raise the voting age to 21? After all, Californians must be 21 in order to buy alcohol and tobacco. And just last year, California’s state legislature raised the age from 18 to 21 to buy rifles (federal law already restricts handgun purchases to people 21 and older).

What’s Worse, a Kid With a Gun, or a Kid With A Ballot?

It’s worth wondering: what would do more harm, letting 18 year olds purchase rifles, or letting 17 year olds vote? The younger a voter gets, the less life experience they have. How many 17 year olds have held a job, paid taxes, or run a company? For that matter, how many 17 year olds have taken an unbiased civics class? In this age of participation trophies, where the average teenager spends most of their waking hours immersed in a Pavlovian love affair with their smartphone, being fed leftist globalist pablum by the soft censors of the social media giants, shouldn’t we demand an older voting age? Wouldn’t that be the responsible thing to do for the health of the republic, starting with California?

There’s big money behind this move to lower the voting age to 17 in California. From advocacy caravans descending on the capitol in Sacramento to sit-ins at Senator Feinstein’s district office, the kids are being mobilized, and that takes adult supervision, and money. The stakes are high. In 2017 there were an estimated 520,000 17 year olds living in California. If half of them vote – a gross underestimate, since they’ll probably set up voting registration and polling places inside the high schools, and the union operatives among the teachers will push the kids hard to cast their votes – that will result in a quarter million more votes.

When 17 year olds vote in 2020, will Democrats get 93 percent of them, the way they did at UC Irvine? Why not? There is virtually nothing reaching these kids that isn’t Democratic propaganda, from everything they see online, to every television show and movie, to everything they learn in the classroom.

Never was the famous quote, wrongfully but frequently attributed to Winston Churchill, more apt: “If you’re not a liberal when you are 25 [or 17], you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”