Claim:
Former Vice President Kamala Harris said the U.S. should lower the voting age to 16.
Rating:
In November 2025, a rumor spread online that former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris had called for the voting age in the U.S. to be lowered from 18 to 16.
For example, one X user posted a meme (archived) featuring a photo of the erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate smiling and a separate picture of young people, one of whom was holding up a “vote” sign. The graphic included text that read: “FORMER VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS ADVOCATES FOR LOWERING THE VOTING AGE TO 16 IN AMERICA.”
The claim appeared elsewhere on X, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.
In short, Harris did make such a proposal. She proposed the idea during an interview on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast in an episode released on Oct. 30, 2025 (archived). In doing so, the former vice president joined a growing number of world leaders who have advocated for allowing younger teenagers to vote. Therefore, we have rated this claim as true.
While speaking to the podcast’s host, British entrepreneur and investor Steven Bartlett, Harris argued that elected officials should work for “the greater good,” before suggesting that leaders need to focus on “being a bit more bold.” One example of this, she said, would be reducing the voting age in the United States to 16.
Harris stated that “Gen Z” — Generation Z, people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, with some sources specifying between 1997 and 2012 — should be invested in “because they know everything that’s happening right now is going to impact them more than anybody older than them.”
Her full remarks, starting at the 1:20:38 mark, were as follows (emphasis ours):
I think we have to do a better job of, also, focusing on being a bit more bold. For example, I think we should reduce voting age to 16. I’ll tell you why.
So, Gen Z — they’re aged about 13 through 27. They’ve only known the climate crisis. They missed substantial parts of their education because of the pandemic. If they’re in high school or college, especially in college, it is very likely that whatever they’ve chosen as their major for study may not result in an affordable wage. They’ve coined the term “climate anxiety” to describe fear of — not only being able to buy a home — but that fear it’ll be wiped out by extreme weather, but fear of having children. It is expected that Gen Z will have 10 to 12 jobs in their lifetime. They are a larger number than boomers. They’re a specific generation of people who are going to impact our nation and the world. And I think we must invest in them.
But I think that they are rightly impatient with a lot of what is the tradition of leadership right now. And if they were able to vote — because they know everything that’s happening right now is going to impact them more than anybody older than them, for the most part, in terms of how these systems work — if they’re voting right now, at 16 and up, they’re going to be talking about the importance of climate, they’re going to be talking about the importance of figuring out how AI is going to affect the future of the workforce, they’re going to be focused on what are we really doing about affordable housing.
Harris was not the first prominent politician, current or past, to propose such a policy. For example, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government said in summer 2025 that they woud lower the voting age to 16 before the next general election (people age 16 and 17 in Scotland and Wales could already vote in their nation’s respective devolved Scottish and Welsh parliamentary and local elections, which are separate to the U.K. general election).
Numerous other countries had already implemented this change, including Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua, as of this writing.
