,
16 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Since my support for radically reducing the voting age is coming up, just a bit on that—specifically on the question of harm, which always seems to be a sticking point for some folks.
The argument for a driving age, a drinking age, a smoking age is simple—the risk of those behaviors is high, and higher if you're not responsible about them. Similar arguments easy to make about marriage, contracts, work—bad consequences are inevitable if you let kids do them.
But with voting the idea of "risk" is a lot harder to grasp. In one sense, there's no "risk" associated with voting at all, in the sense of a potential outcome that everyone agrees is bad and to be avoided. Voting is, in that sense, uttterly risk-free.
The "risk" in giving someone the franchise is that they'll vote for someone you don't want them to vote for. That's it. That's the whole risk. But the idea of denying someone the vote because they're likely to vote for someone you don't like is antithetical to democracy itself.
"Someone bad might get elected" isn't accepted (at least not openly, or by decent people) as a legitimate reason to restrict the franchise in any other context, so why should it be accepted as one here?
"They'd make bad decisions" is a more vague version of that argument, and it's one that a lot of people opposed to lowering the voting age make—kids who could vote would vote for free candy, or no homework, or to make a cursing clown the president, or something.
But of course kids would be a tiny sliver of the electorate, and any candidate who ran pandering to them like that would lose far votes than they won. And when I say tiny, I mean TINY.
Kids aged 12 to 15 are about 3% of the population of the US. Given voting patterns for teens and young adults, they'd likely be less than 1% of the voting pool in any election.
That means they'd only be able to swing an election if it were otherwise divided on the order of 50.4% to 49.6%—and that's only if they voted in a bloc. Which they wouldn't.
In reality, kids voting would likely only be decisive in an election decided by one or two tenths of a percent, and then in only half the cases—in the other half, they'd just increasing the margin of the candidate who was already winning.
And of course in half of THOSE cases (more or less), the kids would swing the vote toward the candidate you support, whoever "you" may happen to be.
In almost every election, the candidate who would win without youth enfranchisement would win with it, and the exceptions are races in which the adult vote was split almost exactly fifty-fifty—races that are now decided by weather or other coin-flip conditions.
That's a big part of why the question for me is whether extending the franchise would be good for kids, and good for society. And the answer to that, for me, is an overwhelming yes.
Kids would become more involved in political and civic issues. They'd learn more about important stuff. Voter participation rates for adults would rise as the kid-voting cohort aged—likely dramatically, over time.
The only big downside is potential coercion by parents or other adults, and it's a serious one. But to deprive a person of a right because someone else might compromise their ability to exercise it hardly seems appropriate.
And yes, of course, this is all a thought experiment—at least for the foreseeable future. But lowering the voting age to 16 is real—it's happened in nearly a dozen countries already, and the arguments in favor of it are, I think, overwhelming.
