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Last week there was a discussion regarding restricting the right of released robbers to vote. In a related reporting, Aotearoa (New Zealand) Supreme Court has discovered that 16 and 17 year olds not being allowed to vote is discriminatory.
The reasoning relies on the fact that Aotearoa's Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits making a distinction based on age between people over 16. From this one could assume that, unlike in the US, the age of majority in Aotearoa is 16, with voting a seemingly overlooked exception. A helpful website contains counterexamples to this thesis as many other rights are also denied to 16 year old Aotearrans.
While today "18" is a common age under which rights are restricted, and its commonality is used to justify it, any deviation from it, undermines it. Age of consent being 16 in Europe (and Aotearoa), alcohol requiring being 21 to purchase it in the US and now voting age being lowered to 16 in Aotearoa, etc increase the uncertainty and invite debate. Debate into why exactly is voting allowed to those that it presently is and denied to the remainder. Attempts are made to search for the principles underlying this discernement usually find no satifactory answer.
What exactly do all law abiding (even this qualifier isn't universal among US states) American citizens over 18, young and old, rich or poor, smart and dumb have; but which no non-citizen or child posseses?
With regards to age, @Tarnstellung said it best—there isn’t a universal law, it’s just very practical to have a bright line. The specific placement of that line doesn’t really matter. After all, everyone started out on one side of it, and everyone will end up on the other. That sort of transience makes the point somewhat moot.
Citizenship, on the other hand, represents a certain investment in the state. This is a (weak) proxy for shared values, but more importantly, it’s skin in the game. There’s next to no reason for a post-Soviet peasant to vote in the best interests of the US; ask him again five years of continuous residence and learning English.
Is he capable of being arrested before those five years are up? Is he required to pay taxes?
Everyone has skin in the game.
Yes and yes.
I get to fall back on the “bright line” argument here. In the absence of an obvious test for sufficient investment in the state, picking a five-year criterion seems alright. Plus—this is discrimination based on choices, unlike age or race. That makes it kosher.
I think it's fair to say "an immigrant has skin in the game, but we're not letting him vote anyway until he becomes a citizen". But this is one of those cases where you need to get the reason right. Because I've seriously seen "he doesn't have skin in the game" used to justify not having citizens vote.
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