So to be fair to my previous post I had not yet RTFA…but after doing so.
The author’s major premise is there is no age cap so why not lower voting age to compensate for the older voters? I’m pretty sure until recently the number of 18 year olds has been greater than 80 year olds. It certainly would hold for 14+ (no driving or militarily service).
His idea never really seems to manifest why putting an age cap on voting would be bad. He mentions life experience, sure you’ll have a couple great people in a sea of rotten apples - but I doubt that’s any different than examining the 14-18 crowd.
If I asked my junior aged self in high school if I wanted to see new tech, better classrooms, more AP opportunities, ect. I’d probably have been excited about the possibility. If you asked me if I wanted my parents to pay more taxes to make that happen, well I’m not so sure. At that age and even now I meet a lot of people who don’t seem to understand money is a finite resource you are taking from me. I’m pretty sure every state has school budget issues and NC’s solution for 20 years has been bonds. Which then turn into sales tax increases because we never dealt with where to get the money the first time around.
There’s no truth in political advertising now. If we moved the age down 4 or 6 years it’s not going to get better. Soon you’d see Instagram influencers in political ads.
It is a silly idea but any serious argument against it I can think of would also be valid against about 70% of the general population. A silly idea to rule silly creatures, all for it.
I was wondering why you thought it would be zero sum? Also, in the United States at least, there is no one person, one vote concept at the federal level. Now we apportion based on population, this proposal is just another way to apportion that has its own advantage s and drawbacks.
And because the U.S. Mail (a federal agency) is being used to send the ballots in both directions, photo ID is not required. Proof of address is that the ballot got to the person, full stop. This needs to become the norm.
I don’t find that particularly convincing. Women are adults who can make adult decisions. Children are, definitionally, not. We don’t trust children to enter into contracts on their own; why would we also put the burden of political action on them?
Maybe I’d be behind lowering the voting age to 16 (after all, we do give people the responsibility of driving at that time). But not lower than that. There are probably more than a few twelve year olds who could out-reason half or more of congress, but there are a lot more who probably can’t. (And yes, there are also more than a few adults who can’t, either.)
I think it’s a silly idea. Evocative, maybe, as a thought experiment, but ultimately ridiculous.
It strikes me as puerile disenfranchisement through creating artificial vote scarcity (that’s what I meant by zero sum), and creating a specific vulnerability in people who cannot vote.
Human brains don’t reach their adult state until the early to mid 20s. There are serious deficits to how brains work at younger ages, they’re still developing.
I think 18 is probably an ok age, since the “I can’t talk to adults” thing a lot of teenagers go through is usually over by then, and people develop more empathy and rational thinking by 18 than they have as younger teenagers, and have had a few years to adjust to puberty and the mental and emotional changes that brings. It’s still before their brain is an adult brain, but if you can be drafted into the military, and you are of legal age to sign contracts, yes, you should be able to vote.
I started voting at 18 - and I definitely would have voted differently in a few cases if I’d been older and had known more. But mostly I think I did ok. I don’t think I would have been a responsible voter at 16, though.
If I remember correctly (and I am one of the dubious geezers who can remember the Nixon administration–as well as the Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt), when the anti Viet Nam war protest brought up the idea of “how can a democracy send people who cannot vote off to a war in which they may not believe?” The first congressional idea was to raise the draft age to 21. The generals had a hemorrhage at this idea, saying, in effect, “we don’t want 21-year-old draftees–by that age they can think for themselves and are harder to order around.” So Congress responded by lowering the voting age to 18, despite the generals’ implicit point that males of that age were less capable of thinking for themselves (females are probably more level headed by then, but imagine the outcry if we extended the suffrage to one sex only. The younger the age, the more malleable: my son briefly dated a Japanese girl in college. Her father was a Kamikaze pilot, recruited like most of them ate about age 15, trained and ready to go when, to his great disappointment, the war ended. If ever in our lives we are so irrational as to be eager to die for some cause, the mid-teens are the time. Give a Muslim lad a vest and Allah’s email address and be ready for the ka-boom!
Not sure if it was conscious of you, but you treated a whole people and a whole religion as a monolith in this post. The vast majority of Japanese teens are not like that, and neither are Muslim teens.
As recent events have shown, American Christian teens are just as easily radicalized as any other group.
The point was that human adolescent males of any nationality are the least rational humans on the planet (testosterone poisoning has a good deal to answer for), and unlikely to be thoughtful voters.
