Should kids who still get an allowance from Mommy and Daddy and sleep in their childhood bunk beds under SpongeBob bedspreads be voting for the president of the United States?

Hell, no.

But a small group of activists who’ve caught the imaginations of some on the far left - looking at you, Rep. Ayanna Pressley -  are pushing to lower the voting age in federal elections. To 16. Presumably because the Clearasil cohort is likely liberal.

It’s a craven movement. Heck, why not lower the voting age to 14? Or 12? Or eight?

In 1971, when 26th Amendment was ratified and lowered the voting age to 18, things were very different in the U.S.

Two words: The draft.

Eighteen-year-olds were being conscripted by the tens of thousands to fight in Vietnam, yet couldn’t vote for the commander-in-chief. Both liberals and conservatives agreed that was unfair. There was nearly universal support for lowering the voting age. 

It made sense. Eighteen-year-olds at that time could legally drink alcohol in most states, sign contracts and were considered adults. They were dying on foreign soil, fighting for a country that wouldn’t give them a voice in its policies.

Eighteen-year-olds had plenty at stake back in 1971. Sixteen-year-olds today? Not so much.

There is no compelling reason to lower the voting age again, except that the far left wants to push a radical agenda on a centrist public and the best way to fast track that craziness is to flood elections with half-baked voters.

Teenagers. And inmates. (We’ll save that one for another day.)

In a Sunday New York Times piece headlined “16-Year-Olds Want a Vote. Fifty Years Ago, so did 18-Year-Olds,” reporter Maggie Astor pointed out that while there are similarities between the two lower-the-voting-age movements, there is little support for giving 16-year -olds the vote. Not yet, anyway.

“Today, there is no similarly popular argument,” Astor wrote, referring to the draft. “Indeed, a recent poll found that 75 percent of registered voters opposed letting 17-year-olds vote, and 84 percent opposed it for 16-year-olds. In March, when Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts proposed a 16-year-old voting age amendment to House Democrats’ sweeping voting rights bill, it failed 126 to 305, with almost half of her fellow Democrats voting against it and only one Republican in support.

“Opponents in both parties have expressed doubts that 16-year-olds are mature enough to vote. But local, youth-led campaigns to lower the voting age have persisted since at least 2013, when Takoma Park, Md., gave 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections.”

This is an unserious proposal by a profoundly cynical movement. Sixteen-year-olds may be able to drive, but they’re not considered competent to sign contracts and they can’t buy tobacco products or consent to medical procedures without their parents’ or a judge’s permission. In Virginia, anyway.

Heck, they can’t even buy lottery tickets.

If we don’t trust 16-year-olds with scratch-offs, why would we give them the vote?