Japan Lowers Voting Age from 20 to 18 Wednesday June 17,2015

 

Japan’s parliament passed a bill to lower the voting age from 20 to 18 Wednesday June 17,2015, adding 2.4 million new voters to the nation’s current voting population of 104 million.

 

The House of Councillors in the parliament, or the upper house, passed the so-called revised public office election law, which was approved by the lower house on June 04,2015

The legislation will come into effect in time for next year’s upper house election. The passage of the bill follows a law passed last year lowering the voting age to 18 in 2018 for national referendums on the Constitution.

The last time Japan’s voting age was revised was in 1945, when the voting age was lowered from 25 to 20, and women were given the right to vote.

The new law puts Japan in line with nearly 90% of the world’s countries in setting the minimum voting age at 18.

Both the main ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the biggest opposition group, the Democratic Party of Japan, backed today’s change in the hope of gaining more support from new voters.