In colonial times in Europe and in North America, a select group of youth, of an age not generally regarded as the age of majority, were permitted the right to vote based on their contribution to society in the form of service in the armed forces. In contemporary times, however, voting rights have not been correlated with military service as women, for instance, were ultimately granted the vote in Western nation States at a time when they did not serve in the armed forces and were not subject to conscription. Voting rights came to be conceptualized as a basic human right post-World War II for every adult citizen as per Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contemporary times, the youth voting rights issue has been, in most Western democratic societies, somewhat trivialized and certainly de-legitimized. This monograph explores why the global youth voting rights movement has not been regarded by most mainstream academics and politicians, or indeed the majority adult population aware of the movement, as a legitimate human rights struggle as opposed to a push for an allegedly arbitrary, invented and illegitimate ‘special’ right. We will examine to what extent the international youth voting rights movement’s lack of substantive progress in most Western States can be explained by fitting the facts of the struggle to a model developed by Clifford Bob.