I said " it seems you may be a poll worker" . Where I live, and I assume almost everywhere, poll workers are all volunteers. Surely you are not saying that unpaid poll volunteers do not need to follow State and Federal laws.
In case there is any confusion, I am talking about parents bringing children in while the parent cast their vote. The children are not voting, they are only observing the process.
On the larger scale I would support a discussion to lower the voting age to 17.
I appreciate your volunteer work at the polls, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but it seems odd that you work within a system in which you seem to have little confidence.
I have fond memories of going to vote with my entire immediate family from childhood until adulthood. It was a great way to reinforce the importance of the process from an early age, and we continued to go to the polls together as long as we lived in the same place. Going into the booth also helped to demystify what was involved, so I was able to call BS on people who used complexity or lack of time as excuses for not voting.
When I was eight I wrote a letter to our Prime Minister about my feelings about animal rights and nuclear disarmament, with some helpful policy advice. I also helpfully included some preliminary ideas and drawings for an environmentally friendly flying car.
I guess what I am saying is that at eight-years-old I would have made an engaged voter and a poor aerospace engineer.
So… why don’t we raise the bar of “maturity and intelligence” somehow? Wouldn’t that be nice? Not that I have any idea how anyone would go about doing that, but reasoning along the lines of “things are already terrible, how could this make it worse?” feels increasingly troubling, even in jest.
Personally I feel they should be set on both ends, 25 to 70. Old enough to have actually lived in the real world for some time and not old enough to pine endlessly for “the good old days”. But I’m also in favor of term limits all around with a max age of starting service at 60. Elected positions should be a service to the country not life long jobs.
Except in Oregon, where everyone votes by a mailed-in or dropped-off paper ballot.
Pizza and Ice Cream party sounds better than the tax breaks for billionaires while pretending to care about church and guns party. Count me in.
I think lowering the voting age a little would be fine. Possibly great.
I do think the concern about kids voting as they were dictated by a parent isn’t so easily handwaved away by merely comparing the argument to the argument against women’s suffrage. The thing that made that concern have it’s power to persuade in regards to women is that women were often at the mercy of their husbands and fathers when it came to their short term and long term survival. When women could have their own checkbooks, jobs, homes, etc., well, now it seems silly. Children, even teenage children, know very well their survival is tied up with their parent’s willingness to continue to support them. It’s why it’s such an outrage how many LGBT kids are thrown out by their parents.
While we can’t just extend the right to have a job and a bank account to children to solve this problem (because it would be unfair to them and create new/old problems), we really ought to solve it. If you have an abusive parent who would control your vote, you should have better options for escape besides “live on the street” and “enter the churn of the foster care system”
Maybe giving the kids a voice would help create an incentive to address these problems or allow children to advocate for their needs politcally. Or maybe us voting age adults should keep these problems in mind and try to think of ways to address them whether or not the kids themselves get a chance to vote before aging out of their helplessness.
In Britain, the National Teenage Party (the predecessor of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party) existed because teenagers were being told they were too immature to vote by people going around leaking state secrets to Russia because of their lack of judgement.
I’m in favor (maybe age 12), and it would have the side benefit of making political ads more interesting since they would need to appeal to kids.
That idea is completely silly. The youth will end up voting in a completely unqualified d list reality tv star who is also a complete sociopath. Old people would never put a maniac in such a powerful position like that… oh wait…
But on a completely non-sarcastic note. I think america’s education system would see a dramatic improvement if they allowed high schoolers vote in school board elections. Even though I was homeschooled in my later teens, I remember seeing a crap ton of old people go to the polls to vote in a school board election. My folks said most of them were there to vote against a proposal to raise school taxes to pay for the construction of a few new schools. Spoilers: the old people won the tax battle. A couple of years later the one of the schools had to be abandoned and everyone was moved from an already cramped school with overcrowded classrooms to an even more cramped setup with not alot of cash to deal with the issue.
So argument for this is that in their opinion younger voters are more likely to hold their beliefs and thus are better?
Eh… but at the same time the argument is that some older voters are under educated. You think kids are much better? Especially those who haven’t even gone through high school level history?
Then there is the fact that poorer, less educated people are more likely to have more kids. And in the US that usually means right leaning. Maybe this won’t work as well as expected.
I mean, we banned Joe Camel because we thought a cartoon character made kids want to smoke. Today they accuse Juul of making vaping cool for kids. And people question how media influences kids on a variety of topics. You honestly don’t think if kids vote they won’t be inundated with focused advertising? I mean, we barely regulate drug ads or political ads, it isn’t like they will be sheltered from it. Shit, regimes throughout history have used the youth as their “child soldiers” in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
IMO - having poorly educated and ill informed voters is just part of democracy. But I don’t think we need to add an even higher percentage of them just because maybe they will vote a certain way. I can almost guarantee if this becomes a thing they will be exploited over night.
Lots of 14 year old disaffected young white boys love MAGA culture. Careful what you wish for
The age cut-off for voting should be equal to the age of criminal responsibility. If someone is considered mature enough to answer for crimes, they should also be considered old enough to vote.
Interesting to see that in almost all countries children too young to vote can be sent to prison as adults.
Personally I am for 15 or 16 for both.
Because disenfranchising people from voting on candidates or policies which, say, affect their life expectancy (retirement policy, Medicare, Social Security, tax policy, etc.) is a recipe for yet more brutal governance?
As a resident of Washington state, this whole notion of “going to the polls” to vote feels so backwards.
Do y’all do the mail-in/drop-off ballots like we do in Oregon?
And there are plent more who are opposed to it. I realised I was a democratic socialist when I was that age.
I later grew out of it, into the libertarian-socialism of the kind Murray Bookchin advocated. People told me I will become more right wing as I got older, but I’m approaching 40 and leaning further to the left.
