Voting from birth?

[jducoeur]

This morning on the BBC, there was an interview with a group in Germany that are campaigning to lower the voting age to -- well, birth, basically. The idea would be to allow kids to vote as soon as they felt themselves competent. Looking around on the Web, I find that the idea has been around for a few years.

My initial reaction was that this was amusing, but rather goofy -- that it's entirely ridiculous on its face. And yet, there is a part of me that rages against the growing infantilization of how modern society treats kids (and, indeed, adults), and a feeling that we do ourselves a damage by not teaching them real responsibility at a young age. The right to vote is the most serious responsibility we give to our citizens: important, and not trivial to do well. Humans learn best by doing, and I do wonder if the best way to teach people that voting is important, and should be taken seriously, is to let them actually *do* it from youth.

So I find myself of curiously mixed minds here. Part of me thinks the idea is fairly preposterous, and would dumb government down. Another part of me thinks that it could, instead, smarten our citizens up. Really, I suspect that a mix of the two would be true. Opinions?

Comments

[siderea]

[continued]

Now, typically, the argument is raised that figuring out which subset of the youth population is adequately prepared to vote is just too much trouble -- that "you have to draw the line somewhere". Which amounts to, "Nope, you don't get to vote because it's more expedient to prohibit you than allow you." I'm not a big fan of "expedient" as an argument where democracy is concerned. Democracy is not expedient, and if we start arguing from expediency, before too terribly long our government will be telling us it's not expedient for any of us to vote.

Age is a terrible way to "draw the line", for pretty much everything. This gets made really clear if we look at the problem from the other end: should we be revoking the right to vote from the elderly? Should we be saying, "Hey, at 80, on average, most people aren't mentally competent to vote so nobody over 80 votes any more?" At what age are you willing to forfeit franchise, just because?

The only advantage that using age as a demarcation has is that it is objective and equally applicable to all people. It is "fair". But fair at what? Fair at disenfranchising a class of human beings regardless of their capacities or desires for handling that responsibility.

It is fair, but it is not just. The people voted into the White House and to Capitol Hill when a boy is 14 may enact the draft which sends him to fight and maybe die when he is 18. I think that boy has a right to participate in the election which could mean life or death for him.

Nor is that the only significant issue. Parental notification of abortion. Funding for college. Funding for pre-secondary education. Health care. Welfare. Minimum sentences. Minimum wage.

We may not like how they vote, but that's not a reason not to let them do so.

So, yes, I do think it's basically a good idea for children 5-15 to be able to vote if they want to.

However, there is a reason parents have control over their children until they become legal adults and it is not abitrary nor an attempt to disenfranchise a large group.

I'd like to challenge you on that. The historical roots of the legal status of children in our society are in the fact that they were chattels, just like women, slaves, and non-human livestock. We justify the prerogatives of parents over their children as "for their own good", but the fact of the matter is that children were (and to a frightening extent still are) owned property, and every "interference" with the rights of parents to dispose of their children as they wish has been resisted fiercely.

It has only been within my life time that controversial(!) cases have established that, for instance, a parent cannot prevent an infant child from receiving life-saving medical care because such care violates the parent's religious beliefs and that a minor child may "divorce" a parent who murdered the child's other parent. That assault and battery against one's own child should be considered a crime is still controversial in certain demographic segments, as is "depriving" abusive adults of the children they have abused.

I do not mean to argue that children do not need parents, nor that children don't constitute a largely impaired class that requires protection. But a truly remarkable amount of what passes for the "protection" of children is the prerogatives of adults to own and to dispose of children's bodies and minds.

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