At least in theory, the American republic is founded upon the right of citizens to vote in elections that decide who runs the country. In theory, that’s what we’ve spent three months exercising in all the primaries. And everyone got their fair vote, right?

Well, except more than one fifth of the population ‘- the under 18 community.

Unlike mental patients who don’t belong to this minority one-fifth group, they just don’t have the mental capability necessary to vote. We let other people represent them, instead.

After all, everyone knows those kids under the age of 18 just don’t have the maturity, experience, sheer intelligence or a bunch of other overly-general positive attributes necessary to make such simple decisions as ‘should I vote for the Republican or the Democrat?’

Rather than let ‘kids’ make any decisions about their own life or even cast a single vote per-person for their government, we let their parents vote for them. This, of course, causes a conflict of interest since the interests of a child can almost self-evidently conflict with those of their parents (‘tax rebate, or funding for education?’), but we ignore that, so as to not challenge our prejudices about young people.

I mean, everyone knows that 18 is the perfect, magic age when you suddenly and immediately become able to handle your own life. Except that ‘- wait ‘- it turns out that we thought the magic age was 21 until the year 1971.

Bull crap. It’s long past time that we gave the vote to everyone in this country able to fill out a registration form and pull the levers ‘- or at least push the age down well into the high-school years. I’ve got facts to back that up, too.

First, we already charge youth as young as 14 or 16 years old as adults, whenever the heck we like. Originally our politicians told us these new powers would only be used to charge obviously disturbed youth with highly violent offenses. However, that doesn’t explain why I found myself in front of an adult judge for a misdemeanor and violation charge at age sixteen (long story ‘- the judge threw out the charges and cleared me entirely.‘ F the cop who put me through that).

But for some reason the youth who can be charged as adults for the slightest matter can’t vote for the officials who decided to charge youth as adults. It’s almost like that part of history when women couldn’t vote for the lawmakers who decided that women couldn’t vote.

Second, children ‘- especially teenagers ‘- pay taxes, just like adults. They pay billions in sales tax every year and always owe payroll and income taxes for anything they earn for actually behaving like mature, responsible citizens and taking a part-time job.

I sure as heck know that even though I didn’t earn the minimum taxable income when I took a job in high school. I still had the taxes withheld from my paychecks, and I was paying into Social Security even though George W. Bush could have privatized the whole program with no word from me.

Besides, the youth constitutes a specific and special interest group whose concerns deserve to be addressed. America consistently ranks near last in international measures of primary and secondary education. I don’t feel at all surprised seeing that the only group actually interested in bettering our schools ‘- the students in them ‘- wields precisely zero political power. They may not have much money, but we could give at least some young people the vote.

And to those who argue that youth lack the basic knowledge or competence necessary to vote, which god comes out of the sky and teaches civics to adults? In a nation where a significant portion of the population wants the outright unscientific theories of ‘intelligent design’ taught in science classes and a not-unrelated group can’t find the nations we’re occupying on a labeled map, could we really make things worse by allowing young people who actually have to learn science and geography to vote? Somehow I think it would actually improve matters.

Finally, allowing young people to begin voting before they leave for college will reduce the amount of unnecessary paperwork by lowering the number of absentee registrations young people need to file.

OK, so maybe I’ve got a few people convinced. What should we make the new voting age?

Personally, I have to go with 14. Nobody but me, even most of the members of the National Youth Rights Association, seems ready to see 5-year-olds with an official right to vote. But depending on which state you live in, 14 is the age when youths become legally able to drive, work for pay, consent to sex, and/or be charged as adults for crimes.

Given that all of these are the normal rights of American citizens that we older folks take for granted, I think their onset constitutes a perfectly good time to grant citizens their right to a legal say over the destiny of their own country.

Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at egottlie@student.umass.edu.