Well, definitely no competence test. That kind of stuff is just ripe for abuse by the privileged classes.
Honestly, I like where the voting age is right now (18). Nobody wants actual children voting, so we are going to need to have an arbitrary cut-off line somewhere, and eighteen is as good as any. Supposedly the human brain isn't fully developed until the early twenties, so getting even further than that just doesn't seem like the greatest idea.
See my issue with 18 as the threshold is that it means only legal adults vote, now while that makes sense it means that an entire segment of the population is left unable to advocate for themselves, there are issues that impact largly or entirely on people defined as children (child labour laws, child abuse laws, climate change, ecenomic policies that take years to come into effect, educational funding, lower minimum wages for younge people, ect...) someone should be voting to help those people and as Boomers have proven we can’t trusted the parental generation to look out for their children.
In fact there’s a quote (now rather old) from one of the founders of the children’s democracy movement, I’m not sure I agree with all of it but I’d say it applies when thinking about if we can trust adults to be the only voice when it comes to advocating for children.
“What is wrong with our sick, neurotic world is that we have been moulded, and an adult generation that has seen two great wars and seems about to launch a third should not be trusted to mould the character of a rat.”
I’d also point to Brexit as an example of the system failing younger people, people who were 16 or 17 when the vote happened are largly how adults now that the decision is about to come into force, yet they got no vote, while a number of older people who voted on the issue have died and thus escaped the catastrophe they voted to inflict on younger people.
Boomers denied younger people the right to vote on their future, voted to destroy that future and then escaped the consequences of their actions, that’s not just.
Edited by Silasw on Mar 11th 2019 at 11:15:13 AM
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ CyranI think that there should be a single age for everything, probably 16. To me, the two years between 16 and 18 don't change much. But the two years 14 to 16 change a lot. 15 might work, but that's a bit squicky to me for a couple of things. That said, it's a nice stopping point in base 10.
If the argument is that people who can’t take on the other responsibilities of being an adult shouldn’t be able to vote that’s a solid one, but it applies both to both people not yet able to take on the responsibilities and people no longer able to take on the responsibilities.
I'm sorry, but you're pushing far, FAR too hard into the idea of "ability" and then drawing this constant absurd false equivalence about how children and old people are the same.
It's that so many of these legal systems (employment law, contract law, property ownership, taxation, driving laws, various drug-related laws) are either heavily restricted for children or outright not involved in them. It's a dual intersection of 1) not having a stake in it, and 2) not having experience in it.
Which is qualitatively different from old people.
Avatar SourceNot sure about lowering the age of full citizenship. Voting is one thing, but do we add in full criminal responsibility and ability to enter contracts into that as well?
Lowering the age for legal drug purchasing is a terrible call in terms of public health and road safety. The age of consent and military enlistment definitely do not need to get any lower.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Well, not drinking age: people mature at different rates, but the development of the brain is rarely finished at 16, which means damage can be pretty tremendous.
In fact, I think drinking age should be kicked up, to 21 preferably.
As for voting, the question would be simpler if voting was mandatory, that way voting at 16, maybe even 15, could be made optional, but I think that goes a bit beyond the boundaries of the debate.
Regardless, someone who's 16 is pretty close to getting into the adult world, and a lot of stuff decided during those two years will directly affect them, so it is only logical and fair that they have a voice, too.
Edited by HailMuffins on Mar 11th 2019 at 9:27:04 AM
I don't think lowering the voting age to 16 works without pairing it with making election day a national holiday. It's hard to vote when a significant amount of your election day is taken up by class. (I could be wrong, since I don't actually know how busy high school is these days.)
We should make an election day holiday anyways, but on the list of reforms that comes before lowering the voting age. Yes, I'm aware absentee ballots, voting by mail, and early voting also exist in some states; Oregon, for example, doesn't run into this issue.
Edited by thok on Mar 11th 2019 at 5:32:56 AM
I stand by my previous comment that sixteen year-olds are too emotionally immature, not unintelligent, to vote and drink, most of it admittedly coming from personal experience. 18 should be the age of adulthood for all those things in my opinion.
Life is unfair...That gets us into a constant regression of "Well, they'll be affected by things that happen in the years before they can vote so they should be able to vote!" down to five year olds.
Avatar SourceWell, there was that article posted in the US politics thread where the author cited that those in the sixteen to eighteen range voted in larger numbers than those over eighteen, and pointed out that those who vote the first time they're able to go on to be far more regular voters than those who don't. One could argue that forming the habit of voting as soon as possible is enough reason to make it legal to do it.
(And went it went into why letting them vote is good versus letting them buy fire arms at sixteen is a bad idea, which was helpful for describing how certain decisions are made.)
Ok found it again
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/sunday/voting-age-school-shootings.html
Frankly, citing "I was an idiot at sixteen" is a really poor and anecdotal argument, based largely on the fact that you didn't think about voting because you couldn't do it. None of us can say accurately how we would have voted had we been able to.
Edited by AceofSpades on Mar 11th 2019 at 7:21:10 AM
The voting age in any country ought to match the age a person is legally considered an adult in that country. Someone who is considered a child by that country's standards shouldn't have to deal with the responsibility and power that comes with voting.
Disgusted, but not surprisedI don't really have an opinion on 16 year olds voting (I don't have any objections, but I also have no strong preferences for it over an arbitrary line at 18).
What I am fairly convinced of, though, is that the legal drinking age should be lower than the legal driving age.
For reference: The legal drinking age in the Netherlands is 16, the legal driving age is 18 (17 if one has a learner's permit and is accompanied by an adult with a license) and our road safety and drunk driving stats are a lot better than countries where the legal drinking age and the legal driving age are the same, let alone the ones where the former is higher than the latter.
That's because in the 'drink first, drive later' system, teens have the opportunity to get familiar with the judgement impairing effects of alcohol and, as a result, most of them know why driving drunk is a terrible idea. Meanwhile in a system where teens learn to drive first and then get to drink alcohol later, they instead develop the idea, whether accurate or not, that they're experienced drivers and then they get to drink (which impairs judgement, making them not recognise that being boozed out of the gills makes them not ok to drive).
Angry gets shit done.See I don’t grant your premis that children don’t have a stake in such things, again many aspects of government apply heavily to children, they are some of societies most vulnerable members and how/if they are protected by society is something they should have a voice in.
Plus nobody ever experiences the totality of government directly, I don’t see someone should be locked out of voting because they either don’t have a stake in one area of government or don’t have experience of other areas.
If we were talking direct democracy I would agree that a limiter makes sense, but the entire idea of representatives if that we are trusting them to make desicions for us, so it’s not like we’re asking them to weigh in on policy directly.
If we as a society are producing such immature people by the time they’re on the cusp of adulthood isn’t that on us? They’re immature because we’ve made them immature, maybe if we let them mature by giving them some responsibility and trust they’d mature a bit more.
Then who is meant to vote to represent the interests and safety of children? The people who’ve jsut left childhood and no longer have a direct interest in things? Sure some of them will, but self-interest is a big motivator. Who else? The children’s parents? Again I submit the boomer generation as proof that parental generations can’t be trusted to look out for their children.
In private of public? For reference the private drinking age in the UK is 5, the age to drink in a bar or buy booze at a shop is 18 (you can also have some booze with a meal at 16). It’s always amazed me that the land of liberty has made it a crime to drink peacefully in your own home under a certain age.
Another age limiter I’d like to bring up, the minimum wage, specifically how some countries have different minimum wages depending on a person age, in the UK for example you have the under 18 wage, the 18-20 wage, the 21-24 wage and the 25 plus wage, so a legal adult has to wait 7 years before their labour is worth the same as that of an older person.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ CyranIt is the responsibility of children to focus on learning and growing and improving themselves to be ready for adulthood. And it is the responsibility of the adults to guide and look after children while they do so. And that includes voting.
That adults all too often fail at this is sad, but that's not an argument for deciding to pass the buck to kids.
Disgusted, but not surprisedThat’s a fair point. And to undermine my own points about getting kids used to voting, giving them a voice in how government treats them and helping them mature by giving them more responsibility, there are better ways to do that.
For example we could give kids much more influence in schools, give them input on school governance, school discipline and their school curriculum. Though this would require a fundamental shfit is how we do education, moving it from something we force upon unwilling to children to something we do cooperatives with he children.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran@thok Many countries hold their elections on weekends. Also, polling stations' opening hours can help a lot. In France (where elections are held on sundays), polling stations must be open from 8am to 6pm (in big cities, they're open until 8pm). So even if you work on election day, there's a chance you can vote before or after your shift. If not, you can designate a proxy (who votes in the same district, not necessarily in the same polling place) to vote for you (to prevent abuse, there is a limit on many proxies a single voter can be given; the giving of the proxy must also be witnessed by an official).
Yeah in the UK polling stations are open until 10PM, the whole not having the time to vote things is because much of the US system is designed to stop people voting.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ CyranTo borrow from the US Politics thread:
I personally would want the voting age even lower than 16, so I'm probably an outlier. I understand why people don't want "kids" voting but I also think our definition of voting is a bit warped.
I'd probably put the voting age at 14 if I could. Mostly because I think it's a good idea to keep it as an ingrained part of culture, and might even encourage folks to pay attention. Also easier to develop as a habit when you're with family and not going off to college, although there are risks.
—shrug— Kids can make bad choices but I also think that ignoring them can lead to a lot of the issues we see, and there should be some way to find a middle ground.
Granted, I would absolutely not complain with an age 16 voting law. I'd be absolutely ecstatic.
Read my stories!I'm just going to point out that for most of my voting life it's been a matter of which parent I would listen to, if I was solely basing my vote on who they thought was best. Like, if I had ever asked Dad who he voted for, I likely would have voted for the other guy just to defy him. I have, for most of my adult life, aligned far more closely with my mom than with my dad.
IE: Not even all couples/parents vote like their spouses, so just assuming kids would just vote the way their parents do kind of ignores at least one major factor and is generally a poor argument.
And anyway, we're not talking about why a person would vote for someone. Why they vote kind of doesn't matter for this particular argument, I think. (Why is more important in convincing a person to vote in the first place, and then to vote for a specific person.) It's a question of whether or not a teenager can understand what they're voting for.
And, well, it's actually a vastly different world than it was when a lot of us were kids in the nineties. For a lot of reasons, a lot of kids are paying A LOT MORE ATTENTION to things now. And also just citing "I was a dumb teen" is again, anecdotal and not actual proof of anything other than you, specifically, being a dumb teen.
Edited by AceofSpades on Mar 13th 2019 at 2:44:40 AM
14 is pretty far low IMO but I am not sure there is a specific counterargument.
You know, how likely is that Oregon bill to pass? My impression is that lowering the voting age is one of these oft-discussed but seldom successful things.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanHeck if I know. Oregon is a pretty democratic area, I think, but I don't really know much about it.
Also, I rather imagine that this is one of those things where it just keeps failing until it succeeds? People said pot was never going to be legal, either, but once it got on the ballots of a few states the people pushing for it managed to make some gains. And now people pushing for it in other states can point to success cases and say "see, nothing exploded or fell apart."
I've come up with one specific argument for not allowing secondary school-age kids to vote:
In most countries, the government (whether that's the national or more local government) sets the mandatory curriculum and, indeed, most of the regulations for government-subsidised schools. Right now attempts to influence future voters through the curriculum and regulations are already not uncommon...
But for the most part, since voters will be about to leave or have already left secondary school at the time they become eligible to vote and will therefore have had some opportunity to learn that what was presented in school isn't always 1:1 with reality, it's not very effective.
If, however, children are allowed to vote at an age where they've not yet had the opportunity to discover that not everything their teacher tells them is the whole and complete unvarnished truth, that kind of voter manipulation is going to go through the roof.
For the US specifically:
There's already many ways in which Red states in the South practice surreptitious (or not so surreptitious) voter suppression. If High School age kids get to vote, you can bet your ass that public schools in predominantly black neighbourhood will not have a day off for the kids to vote and that there will be no voting booths/polling stations arranged to be in the schools themselves, whereas the public schools in predominantly white Republican voting districts will have one or both of those things.
Edited by Robrecht on Mar 15th 2019 at 10:41:05 AM
Angry gets shit done.I'd say that 16-yo (and even most 14-yo) don't believe everything the teachers say without question.
Voter suppression is a very serious problem. However, I don't believe the voting age will impact it one way or another.
Since it is currently taking over the US Politics thread,US Rep. Pressley: Lower federal voting age from 18 to 16 and Oregon may lower the voting age to 16. I also note how nonsensical the counter arguments so far are. There has apparently been a vote in Congress where the suggestion failed, with the majority Democratic Party split and the Republican Party mostly opposed.
Such a state of affairs is currently the case in Austria, Malta, one part of Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua. I take it, is a voting age of 16 a good idea, or should it be coupled to some kind of competence test?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman