Petitioning the 192nd General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Remove the Voting Age Requirement

On June 23, 2021, I led a group that provided testimony at a Virtual Hearing of the Joint Committee on Election Laws in support of Bill H810 An Act to remove the voting age requirement.

Section 1 of chapter 51 of the General Laws is hereby amended, in line 1, by striking out the following:- “eighteen years of age or older”.

Watch the recording of the hearing here. Professor John Wall from Rutgers University began speaking at 2 hours 13 minutes into the recording, followed by Robin Chen then Zewei Chen.

Written testimony was also supplied to the Chairs of the Joint Committee on Election Laws by the following proponents:

• Michael Cummings, author of Children’s Voices in Politics and Professor Emeritus of Political Science from the University of Colorado Denver, Link to testimony

• Alex Koroknay-Palicz of the National Youth Rights Association, Link to testimony

• Victor Sande-Aneiros of the Child Rights International Network [Twitter | Newsletter]

  This article titled 'Silent citizens' explains how denying suffrage to under-18s denies them the same citizenship rights as their adult peers, effectively rendering them second-class citizens; and

  This magazine feature (see pp. 14-19) critiques the logic of the arguments typically used to deny under-18s the right to vote by seeing if the same arguments could be applied to adults.

• Zewei Chen, software engineer, Link to testimony