About two years ago now, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park writing my initial thoughts on what I didn’t know then but would come to know as Youth Rights.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember why she did, but about halfway through the day Greta Thunberg came to mind, and I looked up the voting age in Sweden. And my blood boiled in a way I’ve never experienced in my entire life.
16 years old and one of the most famous and recognizable political activists in the world. 16 years old giving a confident, impassioned, admonishing speech to the fucking UN. 16 years old with no legal right to a voice in her country. No voice to vote for the policies she believed in or the people who might enact them.
My writing, already vitriolic to a fault, managed to become even moreso but with the topic abruptly switched to voting. For the first time in my life, I considered where I’d place the voting age if I could do so unilaterally. Not long into considering it I had a thought that I wrote down immediately, a question I’ve asked well over 100 times at this point with no substantial answer:
When is it reasonable to say to a person, ‘If you’re not at least this old, then I don’t give a fuck what you think’?
And from the moment I had that thought, I have been unable to place the voting age.
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I’ve wondered this ever since I was in high-school. What is the point of a political system I’m not even allowed to participate in other than cute photo ops? If they wanted people engaged in voting there would be no limit and everyone would be encouraged to vote. As to what age we count the votes? I doubt that any line you drew would ever be the deciding point of an election honestly.
America is in the business of preventing voting though, not encouraging it.
People over 80 don’t have as much of a stake in the future. Maybe they should lose the vote?
From an Australian perspective, my proposal is:
- Eligible to vote at 16.
- Compulsory voting at 18.
- A citizen’s vote has a weight of 100% until 20, then drops 5% at each birthday that ends with a 0.
The reason for the diminishing weight of a vote is to correlate with the diminished exposure political decisions will have on the citizen.
Strong agree with your first 2 points, stronger disagree with your last point. Do you seriously think a 40 year old doesn’t deserve a vote?
Using the formula as written, anyone aged 40-49 would have a vote weighted at 85%. You’d have to make it to 210 years old to reach 0%.
Yeah, 5 percent ≠ 5 percent points
Compulsory voting at 18.
HAHAHAHAHA
A citizen’s vote has a weight of 100% until 20, then drops 5% at each birthday that ends with a 0.
Oh my god you really must think age has more power than capital. Jesus hahahaha
Why you gotta be like this?
They’re probably in a bad percentile
Same as the age you can work and pay taxes.
14 is typically the minimum age to have a job (in the US at least).
I was offered a job at a computer repair shop at age 14. Dude had to retract his offer when I told him my age, he assumed I was 17 or older.
Mississippi.
According to this it would have been legal to hire you. There’s a lot of restrictions when it comes to number of hours and time of day that minors are allowed to work though which is probably what they didn’t want to deal with.
Interesting. I’m not quite sure what the laws were back in 1996, but yeah with school and all, plus the travel distance of over 30 miles, even if it was legal for me to work a few hours a day after school, it wouldn’t have been practical at all.
Still nice that he offered the job, I was trying to brainstorm and troubleshoot why my first sound card didn’t work. Turned out he got a defective batch, like 3 other customers had the same issues.
He knew I did all the proper troubleshooting already. Honestly I forget what model sound card it was, but once I proved it didn’t work, he gave me a different card that cost twice as much, for no extra money.
Then that’s the age we should be able to vote.
And if people don’t like it, maybe we outlaw child labor. 🤷♀️
It’s 12 in the US for agricultural jobs. That’s when I started corn detassling and tree trimming and filed my first taxes.
Don’t forget acting too. There are babies and toddlers acting and working for pay.
12? Agriculture is completely exempt from child labor laws. There are 8 year olds working those fields.
Eh, close. No age limits if it’s the child’s family farm. Otherwise, it has to be on a farm already not under minimum wage laws plus a waiver plus limited to short-season harvesting. Which is all super easy to abuse and work around. Personally, I never saw it and heard it happens way more in the southern US states.
I don’t think age is very relevant. Anyone who files a tax return should be allowed to vote.
Any age after passing a basic high school civics test with retesting intervals, age isn’t the thing you’re selecting for it’s the cognitive ability to understand what the government is and how it operates that would be necessary to choose who leads and represents citizens in that organization. We use ages as an approximation instead of doing the work of testing but it may be a poor shortcut.
That’s a dangerous path, and also very likely unconstitutional in the US.
Maybe, but also maybe not. A test that’s targeted specifically at “do you understand how the government functions” is actually quite different from a lot of other tests and less likely to be subjective.
Like, if there was a question, what part of the government writes laws:
- Congress
- The President
- The Supreme Court
if you get that wrong, you probably shouldn’t be voting.
You should take a look at how simple civics tests have already been used in the US election system. It did not go well.
Just did a refresher per your request… We did not ever to my knowledge use civics tests. We used literacy tests and what made them particularly offensive was they had various exemptions for white people or simplified variants for white people.
I am very icy to the idea of tests in general due to the effects having a “test” to vote could have. However, having a very low bar test of some sort administered without exceptions … it might make sense.
We don’t let people drive whose eyes fail a safety test. Maybe we shouldn’t let people vote if they don’t even have a surface level understanding of what they’re voting for.
I’m not saying do it, but maybe we shouldn’t totally write it off because of some bad behavior without any safeguards to prevent bad behavior.
Aside from practical reasons like being able to read and write, I think the age to vote should be as low as possible.
People are concerned that parents will coerce their kids, but that would happen across the board. It would come out in the wash.
The most important thing is that folks are civically engaged as young as possible. They are invested in the outcome and exercise their rights early.
I would say a good starting point would be third grade. Right when you begin learning social studies.
But it wouldn’t come out in the wash. Crazy people would be incentivized to have even more kids to increase their vote. They already do it for “God’s will”, so why not do it for America?
Yes that’s partly the idea. It doesn’t tip the scale. The idea with lowering the voting age as possible it does come out in the wash, but the benefit is that kids are civically engaged. The hope being that engagement carries over as they get older
Honestly I think everything should move to 20.
Alcohol purchase, consumption. Military conscription, draft, voluntary service Age of majority, marriageable age Voting with automatic voting registration Drug consumption including nicotine, caffeine, and cabinets Driving ( permits at a prior age with supervision )
We know people’s brains aren’t really formed enough even at 18 to consider people adults, this younger age is a hold over from even younger ages and doesn’t reflect reality.
People who are not fully developed shouldn’t be able to make decisions with the full weight of adulthood, to take any other position is barbaric.
We’re definitely not at the point that this brain development science should be affecting policy. Here’s an article from 2022 featuring commentary from several neuroscientists. And here are a couple important quotes:
“Some 8-year-old brains exhibited a greater ‘maturation index’ than some 25 year old brains,”
The interpretation of neuroimaging is the most difficult and contentious part; in a 2020 study, 70 different research teams analyzed the same data set and came away with wildly different conclusions.
And here is a different article written entirely by a neuroscientist and released earlier this year.
I think rhe voting age should be the lower of the minimum age to labor or the age of potential conscription less the age of the longest-term official whoss job includes sending people to war.
In the USA, that would put the voting age all the way down to 12. And having both been 12 myself once and having close family who were recently 12, I’m entirely OK with that.
More so than age, I think we should all get a holiday to vote, that holiday’s length should be calculated by population size to accomdate congestion. Then, somehow make voting fun and exciting, the actual experience of filling out a ballot, so these fucking people actually come out to vote. So many fucking people dont even vote. As soon as you are considered an adult you should be able to vote, whatever age that may be to society at large.
And, we should establish something where kids get to vote on something. Anything that directly affects them, maybe some locale thing, and have it be enacted for a period of time. We need people, all people, to physically experience the laws they vote for. Engrain that in them so they dont forget these consequences are real and it matters.
Also: the vast majority of 18 year olds in the states are in, or just graduated, high school. Every single high school should also serve as a dedicated polling station for their students who are of voting age, as a matter of federal law. For state and local elections, too - not just presidential and congressional midterms.
Where I grew up, the schools all the way down to elementary school would hold votes to decide some school policies. Things like dress codes and rules governing hallway use, minor stuff, but stuff students care about and that affected us on a daily basis, and whatever won the vote became policy for that semester. We had lines and ballots and everything… The schools were the local voting places, so they had the official voting booths and everything from real elections. Was a great introduction to the process. We’d even get students canvassing in favor of certain policies beforehand if there was something particularly controversial on the ballot.
That’s really cool! What’s an example of something controversial that ended up on the ballot?
The one that I remember best was restricting eating food outside of the cafeteria. Previously it had been allowed to eat outside (the school had a patio area out where kids would wait for the busses, right outside the cafeteria), but there’d been issues with people leaving trash and things out there. The options on the ballot as I remember them were to continue to allow it with no change, to allow it but to implement strict punishments for anyone caught leaving trash around, or to just ban it entirely, and surprisingly ‘Ban it’ ended up winning, but it was really close. There was a group of students really pushing hard for that; they made posters with pictures of garbage and whatnot outside on the patio area and posted them all around, and got enough support to make it happen.
The student council got to decide the items that went on the ballot and the choices (probably with some faculty pressure for certain things, I imagine), so it was all student-led initiatives, which was neat.
This is one of the things I like about Germany. We always vote on Sundays, which is practically a holiday for us, unlike in the US where stores are still open.
If I had to change it I’d increase it.
The average late teenager is not suitable to have a say. And half of them are below average in that sense.
I’d like to tie it to actually being a tax payer, you pay you get a say in how your hard earned money is spent. But that would throw people who can’t work under the bus.
My teenagers work and pay taxes.
16 is old enough to have taxable income alongside other things in the UK.
69
I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.
I would never let 16 year old me vote.
25 is a solid voting age informed by life experience in the “real world” and a developed brain. Nobody in their late teens to mid 20s can vote with a grasp of reality and understanding of the actual problems that plague society. There is too much optimism and idealistic intentions at those ages. Progress is a slow march against an established defense. Progress, no matter the speed, gains more than attempting brute force attacks against a greater dying populous fervent in their position in opposition.
With a declining birth rate, slow and steady wins the race; or maybe Idiocracy was a documentary and WALL-E is a hopeful outcome of Surrogates.
There are a lot of adults who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but in democracy you let everyone have equal say and don’t make arbitrary rules to exclude certain groups.
That is the beautiful and tragic flaw of democracy and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I think it should be whatever the age is to be able to work a job.
You pay taxes at 14 years old because your asshole of a governor got paid by the meat packing industry? You get to vote.
If you’re going to be eighteen during the person you vote for’s term you should be able to vote.
I’ve had this exact same thought in response to the logic that the voting age was lowered to 18 during Vietnam so that 18yos could vote for a president who might draft them. But that logic extends to 14yos who may end up being drafted at 18 during the president’s term.
That’s an interesting take but with our term lengths that means a 15y can vote for president and senator but can’t vote for a house rep.
Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
It’s really frustrating how little value so many adults assign to the thoughts and feelings of kids. I felt the effects of that a lot while growing up.
Idk. If it were up to me, I think I’d make the voting age maybe 14 or 15. It’s not that an 8-year-old’s feelings don’t matter (to me, at least), but you need to allow them enough time and brain development to be able to start to learn about and understand these kinds of things.
There should also be accompanying education surrounding different political ideologies, history, policies, propaganda tactics, ect., but I’m sure that’d be very unpopular with a lot of parents.
