Today is the deadline to register to vote in time for New York City's November general election. (If you're registering in New York for the first time, your form must be postmarked by today. If you're already registered but want to change your party affiliation in time for next June's primary, your change of enrollment must be received by the Board of Elections by today. You can handle the latter in person at a county BOE office).

And, thanks to the 26th Amendment, you can do so if you're 18. If you're 17, you cannot. For now.

New York State Assemblymember Bobby Carroll, whose district includes Park Slope, Brooklyn, has sponsored a bill called the Young Voter Act that would lower the voting age to 17. He drafted the bill with the aid of some local teens.

Eli Frankel, a student at Bard High School on the Lower East Side, told WNYC that "at 18, you're moving out of the house, you're trying to figure out where you're going to college, where you're going to be living, whether you'll get a job, and voting kind of seems not so big in comparison."

"Once you go off to college," added Frankel's classmate, Chris Stauffer, "it's confusing as hell to fill out an absentee ballot."

The hope is that by allowing registration before students turn 18, they'll have the bandwidth to not only vote, but develop a habit of doing so.

"If you don't become an active voter by the time you're 25, you're never likely to become an active voter," Assembly Member Carroll told WNYC, citing a study that was referenced in The Economist. "You might vote here or there, but you're not going to vote regularly. And as so many of us know, some of the most important elections happen in midterm years."

Part of the bill also includes a requirement that New York high school students receive at least eight hours of civics instruction, and that on their 17th birthdays, that students be handed a voter registration form.

"I think that when you are taught from a young age the importance of voting and how to do it," Bard High student Max Shatan told WNYC, "and when you're instilled with a sense that it's your civic duty to vote in these elections, no matter how unimportant they may seem, people will vote more often."

The voting age hasn't always been 18. When the Vietnam War started, citizens still needed to be 21 to register. Then Congress decided, if 18-year-olds could be sent into combat, they should be allowed to vote, as well. The 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971.

Assembly Member Carroll's office hopes the Election Law Committee will take up the Young Voter Act, which was introduced in April.