... seventeen, not eighteen. There is ample evidence that the American voter of today is not what it once was, even in the recent past. The only way to begin is to look at the Constitution and its clarification of voting rights. The United States was the first democratic society to extend the right to vote to white males. The changes of the American voter begin here, with the blacks achieving the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in February of 1870. Woman suffrage followed, and women gained the right to vote according to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The final amendment added to the United States Constitution, in regards to voting rights, was the twenty-sixth; this amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. This brings me to my main question: Why should the voting age be at the age of eighteen? I feel ...

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