The youth vote in the United States is the cohort of 18–24 year-olds as a voting demographic. Many policy areas specifically affect the youth of the United States, such as education issues and the juvenile justice system. Young people have the lowest turnout, though as the individual ages, turnout increases to a peak at the age of 50 and then falls again. Ever since 18-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1972, youth have been under represented at the polls as of 2003. In 1976, one of the first elections in which 18-year-olds were able to vote, 18–24 year-olds made up 18 percent of all eligible voters in America, but only 13 percent of the actual voters – an under-representation of one-third. In the next election in 1978, youth were under-represented by 50 percent. "Seven out of ten young people…did not vote in the 1996 presidential election… 20 percent below the general turnout." In 1998, out of the 13 percent of eligible youth voters in America, only five percent voted. During the competitive presidential race of 2000, 36 percent of youth turned out to vote and in 2004, the "banner year in the history of youth voting," 47 percent of the American youth voted. In the Democratic primaries for the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the number of youth voters tripled and even quadrupled in some states compared to the 2004 elections. In 2008, Barack Obama spoke about the contributions of young people to his election campaign outside of just voter turnout. History of the Youth Vote Initially, the framers of the U.S. Constitution and state voting laws were skeptical of the role of young people in American politics. States uniformly set 21 as the voting age, although Connecticut debated lowering it to 18 in 1819. In general, young Americans were expected to be deferential to their elders, and John Adams famously cautioned that expanding suffrage would encourage "lads from twelve to twenty-one" to demand the right to vote. Yet as the suffrage expanded to non-property-holders in the early 1800s, young people came to play a larger role in politics. During the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, youths often organized Young Men’s clubs in support of the Democratic, National Republican, Whig, or Anti-Masonic parties. Presidential campaigns often organized torch-lit rallies of thousands of marchers, and analyses of these club rosters show that members were often in their late teens and early