What happened previously, is that states were persuaded to ratify the 26th amendment by the fact that, Congress having already passed a law lowering the age for federal elections, if they were to keep a higher voting age for local elections they would have had to maintain two different voter rolls.
Not at all. I’m suggesting that a single age of majority be employed fairly and consistently throughout this nation. As you have pointed out, Canada uses a 5 year close-in-age exemption so I see no reason that cannot be used in conjunction with a common age of majority.
Common sense helps here. Having a job under the age of majority should require consent of the guardian and application for hardship/education exemptions. Some states in the U.S. operate that way already.
If you leave your 16 year old child at a biker beer bash then yes and if you leave your 4 year old with a group of caretakers then no. Endangering the people over whom you have guardianship has little to do with the age of majority.
I see no reason for them to be different. Continued infantilism of our young adults for our own edification is a poor reason to treat adults like children.
Okay, I think we’re coming at this from two different angles. Since we’re recognizing that there’s gradation in the needs of children of different ages, we could easily have a system where age of majority is 18, but you need to be 12 to babysit. Basically they are just two different things - being able to babysit is not dependent on being an adult.
I think what you are saying is that, at some point you have to be treated as an adult, and at that point it doesn’t make sense to have any age based restrictions. And if we agree that being an adult corresponds with voting rights, age of military service, age at which you are fully responsible for criminal behaviour, then it makes no sense in the world that drinking age be higher than that. If you are an adult then you are an adult and the government should be making that decision for yourself.
So say we agree on a common age of majority (say 18). Under that age all bets are off (not really but the government has a pretty free hand in restricting behaviour), but over that age, you can’t restrict behaviour based on age.
So, if you granted me for the sake of argument that there is no logical connection between “being and adult” and being able to drink, I might then go on to argue that drinking age could be lower that age of majority (say I agree with France that there’s no harm in 16-year-olds being served wine). As long as we’re talking about children, big brother is allowed to make weird age-based rules (whether its no drinking at all, no drinking until 16, no drinking until 8 or whatever). But having a drinking age of 19 is crazy, because it’s illogical that an adult would be denied the right to drink based on their age.
Is that right?
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I suspect that our country is simply too divided to ratify any amendments through any of the possible mechanisms. And if we return to a more unified nation in the future, I suspect there won’t be a lot of political will on either side for lowering the voting age.
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But you have a fully formed brain you help cope wish all that.
I’d be totally cool with a pre vote test for everyone where you have to match candidates with their platforms. That is the least you should know. I’d even allow multiple tries just to make people think about who they are voting for,
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If you have been following the research on brain development over the last 20 years, you know that teenager’s brains are still developing, and the brain doesn’t settle into it’s adult state until the early to mid 20s.
Teenagers have difficulty reading the emotions on other people’s faces and difficulty feeling empathy for people who are different from them, are extremely susceptible to peer pressure and not yet very good at recognizing when their behavior and beliefs are emotion-based and not rational - all artefacts of their immature brains. 16 is just too early to be voting, let their brains mature a bit more.
It sounds like a good idea on paper. But any test can be biased, all the more one that asks questions about politics. If you had a test like that, it would become another tool for gerrymandering, with parties and factions scrambling to be the group that gets to write the test.
I absolutely agree with the thrust of your underlying argument, which is that we should do things to increase voter information.Some ideas I’ve heard to do that include, but aren’t limited to, reform of campaign laws, shorter campaign lengths, and information packets with entries from all campaigns running in a particular election.
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Maybe it should be weighted but not inversely. The 90 year old has 4x more life experience of human nature, and has likely supported themselves much longer and possibly been responsible for family, which makes them infinitely more qualified.
People still tied to parental apron strings should not be in a position to rule over other people. Demonstrate an ability to successfully rule over yourself, then we’ll talk.
This ageist voting bullshit crops up here once and a while and I can’t believe everyone doesn’t see through it as the shite it is.
There are many interesting angles to the franchise and how democratic is just the right amount and such, but this is such a grab bag it’s hard to see what the point is other than “this is a strategy that helps our team win!”. More =/= better, young people haven’t demonstrated a preference for deficit hawks at the voting booth, and argument #1 makes the strawman that it’s about cognitive ability rather than wisdom that comes with age, as well as leaving it just as likely that the best thing to do would be to lower (or rather create) the upper limit rather than the lower limit. Being old enough to see generation after generation fall for hopey-changey snake oil on all sides makes me think if anything it should be raised to 30, and I would happily give it up at 70 in exchange for that.
Those old people were so world-wise and experienced in life that they voted in the majority for a snake oil salesman who was already fantastically corrupt, bigoted, and incompetent before he ever opened his mouth to inform a crowd full of paid plants that Mexican immigrants are all rapists and drug dealers.
Neither have the elderly. In fact, they tend to vote for the party that provably explodes the deficit at every opportunity by considerable margins.
Spare me the wisdom of the ages.
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We certainly didn’t have a civics class either. The closest we got was one day in middle school they sent us to the library, told us we were going to vote on something, and gave us index cards. After looking at some of the library books for awhile, they called us up to vote and then told us that even though everyone had the right to vote, we couldn’t do so because we hadn’t registered in advance. But it didn’t really matter since what we were voting on, Thing 1 or Thing 2, well, it made no significant difference which one won. In retrospect, I guess it was a pretty good lesson.
You have some valid points, but I wouldn’t say infinitely more qualified. I’ll stand by my teenage belief that younger people should have more say in their lives and their future. You’re correct that the optimal case would not be having everything decided by a bunch of naive geniuses, but neither would having it all be decided by a bunch of wise idiots. Best case is probably to let them balance each other out. The argument that children should be seen and not heard doesn’t really hold up any more since, after decades of exhaustive research, it has been scientifically proven that teenagers are actual people and not some strange form of vegetation as was previously believed.
Yes, on all sides. Would you prefer the snake oil with the red label or the snake oil with the blue label? Age doesn’t really matter when those are the options. Perhaps youth could shake things up and give us other options. Us old people consistently fail at that. We repeatedly choose the same old snake oils that we know over the newfangled medicines that we don’t.
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Given our Duvergerian tendency toward two-party politics, this might possibly work, but I can also see it resulting in both parties writing the most vague, anodyne platforms full of Luntz-speak and empty platitudes. Eventually it would stop working as a filter entirely. Meanwhile, filtering voters by competency is all fun and games until you have to explain why a 70-year old farm-worker or wounded veteran can’t vote.
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