Voting age in the context of "Elections in Iran"

The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union (EU) and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts European legislation, following a proposal by the European Commission. The Parliament is composed of 720 members (MEPs), after the June 2024 European elections, from a previous 705 MEPs. It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India), with an electorate of around 375 million eligible voters in 2024.

Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage. Voter turnout in parliamentary elections decreased each time after 1979 until 2019, when voter turnout increased by eight percentage points, and rose above 50% for the first time since 1994. The voting age is 18 in all EU member states except for Malta, Belgium, Austria and Germany, where it is 16, and Greece, where it is 17.

In political science, voter turnout is the participation rate (often defined as those who cast a ballot) of a given election. This is typically either the percentage of registered voters, eligible voters, or all voting-age people. According to Stanford University political scientists Adam Bonica and Michael McFaul, there is a consensus among political scientists that "democracies perform better when more people vote."

Institutional factors drive the vast majority of differences in turnout rates. For example, simpler parliamentary democracies where voters get shorter ballots, fewer elections, and a multi-party system that makes accountability easier see much higher turnout than the systems of the United States, Japan, and Switzerland.

The House of Assembly is the lower house of the Parliament of the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda. The house has 36 Members of Parliament (MPs), elected for a term of five years in single seat constituencies using first-past-the-post voting. Bermuda now has universal voting with a voting age of 18 years. Voting is non-compulsory. The presiding officer of the House is called the Speaker.

The youth rights movement (also known as youth liberation) seeks to grant the rights to young people that are traditionally reserved for adults. This is closely akin to the notion of evolving capacities within the children's rights movement, but the youth rights movement differs from the children's rights movement in that the latter places emphasis on the welfare and protection of children through the actions and decisions of adults, while the youth rights movement seeks to grant youth the liberty to make their own decisions autonomously in the ways adults are permitted to, or to abolish the legal minimum ages at which such rights are acquired, such as the age of majority and the voting age.

Codified youth rights constitute one aspect of how youth are treated in society. Other aspects include social questions of how adults see and treat youth, and how open a society is to youth participation.

Youth suffrage is the right to vote for young people. It forms part of the broader universal suffrage and youth rights movements. Most democracies have lowered the voting age to between 16 and 18, while some advocates for children's suffrage hope to remove age restrictions entirely.

In electoral systems, voter registration (or enrollment) is the requirement that a person otherwise eligible to vote must register (or enroll) on an electoral roll, which is usually a prerequisite for being entitled or permitted to vote.

The rules governing registration vary between jurisdictions. In many jurisdictions, registration is an automatic process performed by extracting the names of voting age residents of a precinct from a general-use population registry ahead of election day. In contrast, in others, registration may require an application being made by an eligible voter and registered persons to re-register or update registration details when they change residence or other relevant information changes.

In law, a minor is someone under a certain age, usually the age of majority, which demarcates an underage individual from legal adulthood. The age of majority depends upon jurisdiction and application, but it is commonly 18. Minor may also be used in contexts that are unconnected to the overall age of majority. For example, the smoking and drinking age in the United States is 21, and younger people below this age are sometimes called minors in the context of tobacco and alcohol law, even if they are at least 18. The terms underage or minor often refer to those under the age of majority, but may also refer to a person under other legal age limits, such as the age of consent, marriageable age, driving age, voting age, working age, etc. Such age limits are often different from the age of majority.

The concept of minor is not sharply defined in most jurisdictions. The age of criminal responsibility, of ability to legally consent to sexual activity, at which school attendance is no longer compulsory and thus a person may leave school, at which legally-binding contracts may be entered into, and so on and so forth, may be different from one another.

The age of consent is the age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. Consequently, an adult who engages in sexual activity with a person younger than the age of consent is unable to legally claim that the sexual activity was consensual, and such sexual activity may be considered child sexual abuse or statutory rape. The person below the minimum age is considered the victim, and their sex partner the offender, although some jurisdictions provide exceptions through "Romeo and Juliet laws" if one or both participants are underage and are close in age.

The term age of consent typically does not appear in legal statutes. Generally, a law will establish the age below which it is illegal to engage in sexual activity with that person. It has sometimes been used with other meanings, such as the age at which a person becomes competent to consent to marriage, but consent to sexual activity is the meaning now generally understood. It should not be confused with other laws regarding age minimums including, but not limited to, the age of majority, age of criminal responsibility, voting age, drinking age, and driving age.