About two years ago now, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park writing my initial thoughts on what I didn’t know then but would come to know as Youth Rights.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember why she did, but about halfway through the day Greta Thunberg came to mind, and I looked up the voting age in Sweden. And my blood boiled in a way I’ve never experienced in my entire life.
16 years old and one of the most famous and recognizable political activists in the world. 16 years old giving a confident, impassioned, admonishing speech to the fucking UN. 16 years old with no legal right to a voice in her country. No voice to vote for the policies she believed in or the people who might enact them.
My writing, already vitriolic to a fault, managed to become even moreso but with the topic abruptly switched to voting. For the first time in my life, I considered where I’d place the voting age if I could do so unilaterally. Not long into considering it I had a thought that I wrote down immediately, a question I’ve asked well over 100 times at this point with no substantial answer:
When is it reasonable to say to a person, ‘If you’re not at least this old, then I don’t give a fuck what you think’?
And from the moment I had that thought, I have been unable to place the voting age.
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Same as the age you can work and pay taxes.
14 is typically the minimum age to have a job (in the US at least).
Then that’s the age we should be able to vote.
And if people don’t like it, maybe we outlaw child labor. 🤷♀️
It’s 12 in the US for agricultural jobs. That’s when I started corn detassling and tree trimming and filed my first taxes.
Don’t forget acting too. There are babies and toddlers acting and working for pay.
12? Agriculture is completely exempt from child labor laws. There are 8 year olds working those fields.
Eh, close. No age limits if it’s the child’s family farm. Otherwise, it has to be on a farm already not under minimum wage laws plus a waiver plus limited to short-season harvesting. Which is all super easy to abuse and work around. Personally, I never saw it and heard it happens way more in the southern US states.
I was offered a job at a computer repair shop at age 14. Dude had to retract his offer when I told him my age, he assumed I was 17 or older.
Mississippi.
According to this it would have been legal to hire you. There’s a lot of restrictions when it comes to number of hours and time of day that minors are allowed to work though which is probably what they didn’t want to deal with.
Interesting. I’m not quite sure what the laws were back in 1996, but yeah with school and all, plus the travel distance of over 30 miles, even if it was legal for me to work a few hours a day after school, it wouldn’t have been practical at all.
Still nice that he offered the job, I was trying to brainstorm and troubleshoot why my first sound card didn’t work. Turned out he got a defective batch, like 3 other customers had the same issues.
He knew I did all the proper troubleshooting already. Honestly I forget what model sound card it was, but once I proved it didn’t work, he gave me a different card that cost twice as much, for no extra money.
Man, it’s a tough one.
In theory, nobody should be disenfranchised by age at all. But at what age would they be able to vote, as in understand what to do, how to do it, and do so without adult supervision?
Until they reach that point, it’s essentially their parents or guardians getting an extra vote.
And then you have to look at other things we limit minors on by virtue of not being able to make informed decisions. So, would we go with driving age, since that’s when we trust them with a ton of death machine? Drinking age? Age of consent for sex (which isn’t always 18)?
If we change it away from 18 to lower, showing that they have the full rights of any citizen, why don’t they get those other rights with enfranchisement? Why is someone able to vote like someone that has the ability to make an informed choice, but they can’t drink? Hell, that’s already a problem since 18 year olds can be sent to fight and die in the military, but can’t have a beer legally.
I would be fine with 16 being the age of majority for everything if the individual wanted it. You wanna step into adult life, with all the rights and responsibilities, I don’t have an objection to that at 16. I had too many patients that were married and working before 18 to pretend that it isn’t realistic for someone that age to step into adulthood. I don’t think it’s the best choice, but I wouldn’t fight it if the world decided that way.
I could definitely made an informed decision for voting at 16. I had access to alcohol, and was able to make the decision to not use it, same with tobacco. I had access to sex, and made the decision to make it safe sex. I was a decent driver, and didn’t have even a fender bender until I was 19, and I wasn’t the one that caused it then. All of the stuff that we limit to “adults”, I know I would have been fully capable of making informed and conscientious decision about any of them.
But I also knew other teenagers that were absolute morons that couldn’t be trusted not to jerk off in the school bathroom. I knew 16 yos that wrecked cars and put other people’s lives at risk in the process. So I’m okay with the age of majority being 18 too; some of those morons would just flip a coin for their vote, and the mock votes we’d have in school were laughable across the board.
Not everyone can make an informed and conscientious decision at 30, much less 18.
So I don’t really think it needs to change, but I agree with you that it sucks that it’s so arbitrary.
We seem pretty well-aligned. Personally I think 16 is the absolute latest a person ought to have the liberty to do anything that we age restrict. I was talking to someone from Scotland recently where the Age of Majority is 16 and he said that it’s not uncommon there for 16yos to graduate their school system, marry their person, and start a family.
So to me that is at least some amount of evidence that if we simply perceived 16yos as adults, they would behave more like adults.
why don’t they get those other rights with enfranchisement?
ton of death machine?
because that endangers others too
Drinking age?
because alcohol negatively effects development
Age of consent for sex
because teenagers have sex anyway; making it illegal would only be harmful
Until they reach that point, it’s essentially their parents or guardians getting an extra vote.
Honestly I’ve sometimes thought that parents ought to be able to vote for their kids. At least that gives some form of representation to children.
In that regard, they already have representation by their parents’ votes. All it would achieve is giving parents outsized voting power.
which isn’t a bad thing either if you want to encourage people to have more kids (which of course is debatable whether that should be a goal, but many people think it should)
In that regard, they already have representation by their parents’ votes.
But that vote only counts as much as one person, so it doesn’t give any more representation to the child if you ask me. My whole point is that a parent should have outsized voting power because they represent two persons, not one (okay actually each parent would get 1.5 votes as the child’s vote would be split on each parent but my point is the same).
No, no citizen whatsoever should be able to cast the votes of other citizens, period.
If the kid can’t get in the voting booth by themselves, cast their own vote without assistance, then they aren’t voting, someone else is.
That’s ableist. Not every voter can can get in the booth by themselves.
Dude. You know what I’m talking about, don’t pretend otherwise
The idea is that the parent represents the child. We don’t trust children to make an informed vote, but we trust parents to make all kinds of choices for their children, including extremely personal choices. The current alternative is to not give children a vote at all. I think letting parents choose the vote for their child is better, and fits pretty well with all the rest that parents currently choose for their child. I also think it’s better than simply letting children of all ages vote, since again, they probably won’t be able to make an informed vote.
So, all I have to do is pump my semen into enough women, get them knocked up, and have thirty votes? Awesome! I’ll be my own bloc!
I mean… you can already kinda do that right? Raise your children to have similar values to you and they’ll vote like you when they grow up. That happens constantly. There’s just an 18 year latency to it. Obviously you lose the vote once they grow up to vote by themselves. I feel like you’re making a bit of a strawman out of what I’m saying here. We clearly just disagree and that’s okay.
The minimum age anyone can do any of these things:
- Pay taxes
- Hold a job
- Get married
- Sign a contract
- Join the military
I think that’s currently something like 12 in the US, which is a huge problem.
16
if you can get taxed as a worker at 16 you get to vote.
This was my first thought, but then it occurred to me that if I was voting at 16, I’d almost certainly be voting for who my parents told me to. I’m still not against it but I think we’d need specialized education and tons of PSAs aimed at kids about it, because unless you’re already rebellious, “my house my rules” could easily be extended to voting.
I think it should be 16 or so. If you can wreck my car, you should be able to vote.
I think it should be whatever the age is to be able to work a job.
You pay taxes at 14 years old because your asshole of a governor got paid by the meat packing industry? You get to vote.
I would never let 16 year old me vote.
25 is a solid voting age informed by life experience in the “real world” and a developed brain. Nobody in their late teens to mid 20s can vote with a grasp of reality and understanding of the actual problems that plague society. There is too much optimism and idealistic intentions at those ages. Progress is a slow march against an established defense. Progress, no matter the speed, gains more than attempting brute force attacks against a greater dying populous fervent in their position in opposition.
With a declining birth rate, slow and steady wins the race; or maybe Idiocracy was a documentary and WALL-E is a hopeful outcome of Surrogates.
There are a lot of adults who shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but in democracy you let everyone have equal say and don’t make arbitrary rules to exclude certain groups.
That is the beautiful and tragic flaw of democracy and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
More so than age, I think we should all get a holiday to vote, that holiday’s length should be calculated by population size to accomdate congestion. Then, somehow make voting fun and exciting, the actual experience of filling out a ballot, so these fucking people actually come out to vote. So many fucking people dont even vote. As soon as you are considered an adult you should be able to vote, whatever age that may be to society at large.
And, we should establish something where kids get to vote on something. Anything that directly affects them, maybe some locale thing, and have it be enacted for a period of time. We need people, all people, to physically experience the laws they vote for. Engrain that in them so they dont forget these consequences are real and it matters.
Where I grew up, the schools all the way down to elementary school would hold votes to decide some school policies. Things like dress codes and rules governing hallway use, minor stuff, but stuff students care about and that affected us on a daily basis, and whatever won the vote became policy for that semester. We had lines and ballots and everything… The schools were the local voting places, so they had the official voting booths and everything from real elections. Was a great introduction to the process. We’d even get students canvassing in favor of certain policies beforehand if there was something particularly controversial on the ballot.
That’s really cool! What’s an example of something controversial that ended up on the ballot?
The one that I remember best was restricting eating food outside of the cafeteria. Previously it had been allowed to eat outside (the school had a patio area out where kids would wait for the busses, right outside the cafeteria), but there’d been issues with people leaving trash and things out there. The options on the ballot as I remember them were to continue to allow it with no change, to allow it but to implement strict punishments for anyone caught leaving trash around, or to just ban it entirely, and surprisingly ‘Ban it’ ended up winning, but it was really close. There was a group of students really pushing hard for that; they made posters with pictures of garbage and whatnot outside on the patio area and posted them all around, and got enough support to make it happen.
The student council got to decide the items that went on the ballot and the choices (probably with some faculty pressure for certain things, I imagine), so it was all student-led initiatives, which was neat.
Also: the vast majority of 18 year olds in the states are in, or just graduated, high school. Every single high school should also serve as a dedicated polling station for their students who are of voting age, as a matter of federal law. For state and local elections, too - not just presidential and congressional midterms.
This is one of the things I like about Germany. We always vote on Sundays, which is practically a holiday for us, unlike in the US where stores are still open.
IMO, it should be 16. It should be the earliest age that you can work in a traditional job, or begin service in one’s armed forces. Many right-wing people hate this idea because young people are very left-leaning, but it is unfair to expect someone to contribute to a society that bans them from having a say in its outcome.
"18. " This is the age you should be able to: vote drink be liable as adult for everything join the military smoke (please don’t)
One age to do everything. 18 is ‘Adult’, that means no age restriction beyond that. At least until you get to retirement age.
What is that based on, though? Why a single age for everything, when it might make sense to have it more “targeted”. For example, wouldn’t it make sense to allow voting in local elections, where things are usually simpler and cause and effect clearer, at a younger age?
Similarly, why tie drinking regulations, which are based on physiology, to voting age, which has nothing to do with it? You may say it’s because if the person is mature enough to vote they can decide themselves, but there is a huge amount of things I’m not allowed to buy or consume even if I’m allowed to vote, so that argument doesn’t hold (unless you advocate 100% liberalization of everything).
Having just a single age limit just makes it all seem very arbitrary, which it shouldn’t be.
My point is, at a specified age, you are considered an Adult. If you are old enough to die in a war and vote for candidates, you are old enough to drink, own a gun and whatever else. I personally think that 19 or 20 would be a better age for adulthood.
you are old enough to drink, own a gun and whatever else
Does that include e.g. doing hard drugs? Are you also allowed to e.g sell hard drugs, or e.g. potentially harmful products, such as power tools without certain currently legally mandated safety features if the buyer is an adult? Are you allowed to sign away certain rights that you are currently not allowed to sign away, e.g. should an adult be allowed to sign themselves over to slavery without the possibility to undo it?
I feel like it was pretty obvious they meant you could do everything that’s legal once you reach that age. I don’t think anyone is arguing that laws applying to everyone should just disappear at a certain age.
But the point is that just because you are old enough to vote, doesn’t mean you are necessarily mature enough to make certain decisions.
One could well argue that if the reason we are not allowed to heroin is related to health, or crimes due to addiction, then an 18 yo should not be allowed to use it, but a 90 year old would. I would even argue that we might want to allow hard drugs to 80 year olds, who probably can take responsibility by then.
Join the military and ask yourself that question again
I’ve already served in the military. What question am I supposed to ask again? Or do I need to re-enlist first? I’m not sure they would accept me at my age anymore.
or e.g. potentially harmful products, such as power tools without certain currently legally mandated safety features if the buyer is an adult? Are you allowed to sign away certain rights that you are currently not allowed to sign away, e.g. should an adult be allowed to sign themselves over to slavery without the possibility to undo it?
I have no clue what you were getting at with the drugs, but depending on the circumstance, teenagers that are of the age to enlist can do certainly do these things. I went through two furloughs where I didn’t get paid on deployment and didn’t get compensation. In fact, at one point my checks were garnished because my admin screwed up on per diem when I initially had them check everyday before my transfer to make sure the money was right. They got so pissed at me that their chief told me to not approach their office again with this issue, and they fucked me anyway. I owed around $5000 to the Department of The Treasury because they told me the leftover monet wasn’t an error and that I could go on with my life. That was wrong. And what was I supposed to do? Not do my job? If I would have done that, I would have got an NJP which would have costed me 50% of the 25% that was already garnished. So how is that not slavery or at the very least indentured servitude?
And let me make it clear, I signed the contract that said, “You’re officially government property.” we pay you as long as you do what you’re supposed to do. I did what I was supposed to do and got fucked anyway. I couldn’t pay my rent or bills, so the utilities reached out to my command and I got fucked even more. I had to go to financial management training and was barred from living out in town. You telling me that’s justified?
You telling me that’s justified?
No, I’m not, and I’m not sure why you think I am.
It is all arbitrary though. There are some weak arguments about mental development but other than the generally accepted rule that human brains stop developing at around 25 years old, there isn’t any hard science between 16, 18, 21, or whatever. Individuals hit developmental milestones at different ages, whether they are physical or mental. Each age-restricted activity requires different types of development. A high schooler may be able to make an informed decision on who or what to vote for, but will be subject to peer pressure to drink alcohol to a dangerous level. You can now sign up to potentially get killed in an instant at 18, but you can’t intentionally give yourself cancer slowly. Kids have better reflexes than seniors, but are also more reckless (imo both ends of the age spectrum should require more frequent driver’s testing and restrictions).
So since it’s all arbitrary, either we make everything one age, and 18 is a common median of the age-restrictions, or we ditch the restrictions entirely and rely on more extensive and expensive regulations based on individual development.
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It’s really frustrating how little value so many adults assign to the thoughts and feelings of kids. I felt the effects of that a lot while growing up.
Idk. If it were up to me, I think I’d make the voting age maybe 14 or 15. It’s not that an 8-year-old’s feelings don’t matter (to me, at least), but you need to allow them enough time and brain development to be able to start to learn about and understand these kinds of things.
There should also be accompanying education surrounding different political ideologies, history, policies, propaganda tactics, ect., but I’m sure that’d be very unpopular with a lot of parents.
If you’re going to be eighteen during the person you vote for’s term you should be able to vote.
I’ve had this exact same thought in response to the logic that the voting age was lowered to 18 during Vietnam so that 18yos could vote for a president who might draft them. But that logic extends to 14yos who may end up being drafted at 18 during the president’s term.
That’s an interesting take but with our term lengths that means a 15y can vote for president and senator but can’t vote for a house rep.
Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
There should be a maximum voting age.
I’m conflicted on this. I used to think kids at 16 would be a good counterpart to old people, being more revolutionary in nature and so on. Maybe they don’t have a good sense of how things work in life yet but it would help balance out the people who are so stuck in the old ways that it ends up being fair.
But the reality I see is that they are very easily manipulated by unregulated media like TikTok and would vote for the same extreme right wing party as old people. Surveys here in Germany are a bit disturbing…
Can’t we instead take away voting rights from old people? Also kinda wrong.
How about a voting license that needs to be renewed every 30 years? You have to pass a test that checks if you are capable of thinking objectively or something like that.
How about a voting license that needs to be renewed every 30 years? You have to pass a test that checks if you are capable of thinking objectively or something like that.
Any type of criteria that is not absolute (like age), can and will be used to exclude certain groups of people from voting.
Age is no exception. Older voters lean conservative, while younger voters are more progressive. Age restriction is voter suppression.
Lots of these voter tests were implemented during the Jim Crow era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test). Reimplementation would be disastrous for many groups of people.
That’s a different test and the rules were flawed because it was obviously made to discriminate african americans. But I’m aware it’s not as simple as it sounds to me and leans towards ableist.
But the reality I see is that they are very easily manipulated by unregulated media like TikTok
As opposed to adults?
RFK Jr. is now in charge of the department that handles voter licensing requirements and sets the criteria for “capable of thinking objectively”. Yikes, and he’s not even the worst person for the job I could conjure up in 5 seconds of thought.
I’ve never seen any evidence that adults aren’t also manipulated by media. I would also add that claiming someone isn’t mentally strong enough to vote by themselves without being subject to others was also used as an argument against both women and black people not being allowed to vote.
I was thinking about white people specifically though. But of course this system can be steered towards whatever the people in charge think it should be steered to. Which is why I don’t think it’s really feasible.
But the reality I see is that they are very easily manipulated by unregulated media like TikTok and would vote for the same extreme right wing party as old people. Surveys here in Germany are a bit disturbing…
The same argument can be made for people of any age.
Can’t we instead take away voting rights from old people? Also kinda wrong.
The same can also be applied to younger people.
Personally, I prefer to err on the side of including them. It’s unjust that we can take advantage of them in so many ways as a teen but they can’t participate in the political system that decides how they can be taken advantage of (work, school, taxes, military, etc.) I know I hated it at that age and as a general rule, I’ve tried not to repeat the same things the adults in my life did that pissed me off when I was a kid. It’s not a perfect approach, but it’s been the correct approach to avoid the problems it caused when I was growing up from being repeated more often than not.
The only way to do right by them is to give them the right. If you are worried about them being manipulated too easily, education is a good fix.
16 - 65
If I could wave a wand and fix something about voting in the US, it would be to improve access for already qualified voters.
Kids would vote similarly to their parents in general, so lowering the age means people from groups/locations that have good access would have more votes (not a bad thing) but groups/locations with poor access would still have poor access, possibly even worse access because of the increase in voters. So yeah, fix access first or it only exacerbates what I consider to be a larger issue in need of addressing.
Assuming good access to voting though, 18 makes sense to me as the time a person is an adult and legally responsible for themselves. I would be open to arguments for younger, it’s just not something I ever felt passionate about, even when I was under 18 years old.
Just like women vote the same as their husbands? We’ll practically double the line length at the polls if we give women the vote, and their votes won’t really matter, because it’s the same as if their husbands or fathers just voted normally. Not worth the effort.
Not being an ass, it’s just that every single argument I’ve ever seen against lowering the voting age has been almost identical to the arguments used against women voters back in the day. I’m not suggesting you’re against women having the vote, just that the arguments are similar, and pointing that out helps to demonstrate why they might not as strong as some would think. Teenagers are also notoriously capable of disagreeing with their parents on political issues. It’s sort of a thing with them often enough.
Totally agree about access to voting. Automatic registration at 16, coting day a national holiday, polls should be open for at least a month, with every post office a polling place, and government run bussing to and from polling places, and mandatory paid time off for wt least 1 day in that month. Universal suffrage. Including incarcerated people. Honestly, nothing should be able to interfere with your right to vote. I go back and forth on compulsory voting, but tend to lean towards it. And this is coming from an Anarcho communist, who doesn’t generally believe we’re ever going to fix things through the ballot box.
No one’s fighting for teens to be recognized as adults at 16, and they will all have the right to vote in two more years, so I don’t see the parallel at all to the women’s suffragist movement who couldn’t ever expect to vote, married or not, and were part of a broader campaign for women’s rights. If there was momentum to make 16 the age of legal adulthood, it would make sense that voting would be a part of it.
16 is arbitrary. Not linked to any legal status. Not linked to the age at which one can work and pay taxes. Not linked to any milestone being identified. Like I said, open to arguments but it needs to be better than “younger than 18, set it at an aesthetically pleasing number… 16 will do.”
The most convincing arguments I see are about being able to vote for the president who could draft you, so theoretically voting at 14. But my preferred condition, and where I would throw any activist energy, would be to get rid of the draft entirely.
I’m also against compulsory voting. Absolutely against it in current state with all the access issues we’ve agreed upon. Even with perfect access though, declining to vote can be a political statement in itself.
Some people here saying the same age you work and pay taxes and I absolutely agree, but with the caveat that it shouldn’t be compulsory before age 25.
And I pick 25 as it’s the average age iirc the brain is considered to be fully matured.
I personally had no clue of what I was doing and regret my first few rounds voting. I was aware at the time that I lacked the information and the big picture view of the political situation to make an informed decision though, and wished I could avoid voting entirely but in my country it was compulsory.
