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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?
Ignoring the non-sequitor and entirely separate issue of citizenship, one answer is legal independence from their parents. If you give children the right to vote, the majority of them are just going to vote for whoever their parents tell them to. This is not universal, some rebellious teenagers will stray and choose the other party, but most will not. Even if they vote in secret, they could be pressured and interrogated by bad-faith parents afterwards and punished if the parent believes they voted incorrectly. Children do not have the freedom or authority to decide when they go to bed, how can they be expected to run the country?
Additionally, age is the only fair and equal way of addressing intelligence while still weighting the vote of all people approximately equally over the course of their lives. That is, it would be nice if smarter and more mature people voted while less intelligent people did not. But if you implement IQ tests or something comparable as requirements to vote then some people would be permanently disenfranchized, reducing their ability to have their voices and concerns weighed appropriately by politicians (especially when IQ correlates with other traits and demographics), and massively decreasing their loyalty to the nation. But everyone ages, so if you disenfranchize children, they eventually become adults and get to vote just like everyone else. Every person has an equal amount of time not voting before they get old enough and then vote, so nobody is unfairly treated. The only people who never get to vote are people who die before they turn 18, which is a tragedy we already attempt to prevent for other reasons. As such, we accomplish part of the goal of preventing unintelligent votes, with very few of the moral or practical costs that a more restrictive policy would entail.
What justification do you have for believing this? An 18-year old's vote is going to be heavily left-leaning pretty much no matter where you go in the democratic world, but you think the 16-year old vote would instead track the 45-year old demographic? Why?
Because few 16 year olds are going to be interested in politics or politically aware. They may be interested in causes but when it comes to voting in the local election for Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, neither of whom has a strong position on "save the planet from climate change" or "should I have to be in by eleven on a school night when Susie can stay out until one?", then they won't see any very strong reason to pick "white person same age as my parents over other white person same age as my parents".
So unless their parents are going to the polls, and drag Junior along, there's not much likelihood Junior will bother to vote of their own accord. And if Junior is all "Ugh, I hate this, why are you making me do it?", then it's just as likely they'll vote for whomever their parents said "Oh for heaven's sake, just put X beside John Johnson's name" in order to get this done fast so they can go back to doing stuff they enjoy and care about.
See the quote from that deleted Sequoia article about Sam Bankman-Fried:
Yes, wasn't it so coincidental that he managed to come all on his own to the same conclusion on the same topic as the view everyone else around him held, including his parents who had brought him up to hold those views? "His parents raised him and his siblings utilitarian—in the same way one might be brought up Unitarian—amid dinner-table debates about the greatest good for the greatest number."
Do you really imagine if 16 year old Sam was going to vote in a local or national election, he'd vote for a different candidate than the Democrat his parents were going to vote for?
I imagine most 16-year olds would vote Democrat because they're in roughly the same environments as 18-year olds and would therefore vote similarly. The fact that their environments encourage voting Democrat and not Republican is ultimately downstream of the Democrats being more effective at messaging to young people. That's just politics.
I'm not really sold on lowering the voting age, mind you, as the same-age-for-everything idea is very appealing. But I'm completely unconvinced by this idea that 16-year olds in particular would just ape after their parents and completely disregard all the other pressures around them.
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Because the 5 year old would (and usually should) do what their parents tell them to, and 16 year olds are somewhere in between 5 and 18. It's a continuum, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere (unless you think 5 year olds should vote too). The distinction between 18 and 16 isn't much different from the one from 16 to 14, or 14 to 12, etc. It has to be somewhere.
More importantly, as I state, 16 year olds are not legally independent from their parents. I'm not just relying on the argument that 16 year olds are simpletons who do whatever they're told like 5 year olds do, but also that the relationship is inherently coercive. It is relatively easy for a parent to apply soft punishments to their kid that sway their behavior while falling short of legal child abuse or any feasible law against parents punishing their children for their voting choices. And while the majority of parents would not do this, especially if it were illegal, some would. And if one political tribe were more likely to do this it would give that side a direct reward for doing so, influencing politics in favor of people who are better at manipulating their children. It's not that I'm afraid children forming actual political opinions will tend to agree with their parents, it's that children will vote how their parents want without actually following their own political opinions (or even forming genuine ones in the first place).
If we were to simultaneously lower the age of majority and the age of voting to 16, I wouldn't take issue with the voting component of this change, though I would have qualms about the age of majority changing. That is, the minimum age of voting should be equal to the age where children get legal independence from their parents, regardless of where that limit is, because that's when they simultaneously gain the freedom to make their own decisions with significantly less coercion, and (at least in theory) become productive members of society who participate in it directly instead of through their parents. I think I'd be in favor of exceptions where minors who are legally emancipated from their parents and taking care of themselves (rather than being wards of the state in a shelter or foster home or something) can vote. But not kids with parents: their parents can vote and act to uphold their interests politically, just as they uphold their interests in other areas.
I like this post, but I'd like to also note that legal independence is only a component of this; given extended childhoods and more young adults living with their parents and so on, we honestly can't use this as the Only True Standard for legal propriety(?). I've seen, for example, trans adults stuck at home with lower-income families whose parents are pretty much the polar opposite of them politically, having to conceal their voting records and other non-political activities, trapped either for want of their own home or to ensure their parents are still taken care of.
So, this is to say that legal independence is a good measure (and as you allude to, we determine voting age from age of majority/adulthood, which we in turn derive from a mixture of vague socio-cultural ideas and neurobiological evidence), but if you're really concerned about the "parents coercing their kids" angle, turning 18 doesn't magically free the new voter from social pressure.
It's not magic, it doesn't fulfill the task perfectly, but again, the cutoff has to be somewhere. Having a predefined, unambiguous, and fair method for the cutoff is better than tests which might correlate better with some things but open up others to accusations of or actual corruption and bias that unfairly disenfranchises some groups more than others. So having a single age at which people get to vote is a good method to accomplish this, and among all of the ages, 18 seems like the logical choice. If we somehow came up with a reasonable measure for social coercion on someone's vote, and averaged it over people at each age, there would be a discontinuous jump around the 18th birthday, maybe slightly afterwards when people leave home for college. It would not be absolute, it might even show that the jump would even be smaller than the total increase summed through ages 12 to 16, but age 18 would have the highest derivative on average because of the legal rights it represents. An 18 year old might still live with their parents and face social coercion, or they might not, and if the coercion gets too bad they can leave. A 16 year old is legally stuck with very few exceptions.
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