WELLINGTON: A law that, if it had passed, would have given sixteen-year-olds the right to vote in local government elections was withdrawn by the New Zealand government on Friday.
After ruling in late 2022 that the nation’s current voting age of 18 was discriminatory, New Zealand’s top court compelled government to consider lowering the age.
While the previous Labour government attempted to pass legislation lowering the voting age for local government elections, it last year rejected the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 for national elections. But before they were elected out of power in the latter part of last year, this was not made into law.
“Worrying about how to implement a new voting age regime would be a costly distraction for councils who have enough issues to deal with right now,” he stated.
Make it 16, a nonpartisan group advocating for a lower voting age, declared that denying 16 and 17-year-olds the ability to make decisions about their own rights is a “democratic outrage.”
They wrote, “Democracy is when voters choose their politicians, not when politicians choose their voters,” in a statement that was shared on X, the platform that was once known as Twitter.