Law Commons^™

Popular political participation is the core of democratic government, and the archetypal participatory mechanism is the vote. For centuries, voting was a privilege limited to few, but democratic norms now require that electoral inclusion be presumed, and exclusion justified. Accordingly, few exclusionary rules remain. Among them are citizenship, law-abidingness, and minimum age requirements. The last of these, all but ignored by legal and political theorists, is this Article’s focus. The age of electoral majority has declined, over time and across the globe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average voting age worldwide was just under twenty-four; today, it …