
Should children have the right to vote? - rw
http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=389
======
tptacek
An argument you might make against juvenile suffrage is that the current
system protects children from politics. It's not simply that they'd vote the
way their parents wanted them to, thus slanting the outcome, it's that they'd
be targeted by political pressure --- from their parents, teachers, peers, and
the media --- in ways that they aren't today.

~~~
DavidSJ
Generally speaking, when adults tried to protect me from myself as a kid, they
did much more harm than good.

I believe this is true for most kids.

~~~
muerdeme
How is protection from politics protecting the kids from themselves?

Given how much it pisses me off, I kinda wish I were still protected from
politics.

~~~
DavidSJ
If I said "woman need to be protected from politics", I think you'd
justifiably interpret that as suggesting that they be protected from
themselves. Maybe you think they _should be_ protected from themselves, but
that is what you're doing, essentially, when you try to shield someone from
exposure to ideas and the capacity/responsibility to make judgments about
those ideas.

Put another way: you're trying to deny them the opportunity to make a certain
choice (that is, vote) for their own good. That is the definition of
protecting someone from them-self.

~~~
tptacek
Your logic doesn't work. There is no similarity between "protecting women" and
"protecting children". Women don't need to be protected. Children obviously
do, at least from some things.

~~~
DavidSJ
You misunderstand me. I was not, in that comment, stating that women and
children should be protected (or not) from the same things.

I was pointing out, simply, that (whether right or wrong), being "protected"
from politics _is in fact_ protection from oneself.

Now, you may feel that children _should_ be protected from themselves, whereas
women should not. That is a perfectly consistent position. The grandparent
seemed to be unclear that that is what you were advocating, and that is the
confusion I was clearing up.

------
ejs
I have always believed that if you are forced to pay taxes then you must be
given the right to vote. I thought it was incredulous that at 16 I was
required to pay taxes yet unable to vote or influence where my money would go.

~~~
bokonist
You pay rent to your landlord, should you have the right to tell the landlord
how to spend it? What is a government but a very big landlord?

~~~
azanar
Your assertion hinges on the assumption that the government exists
autonomously, apart from the people it represents. If my landlord claimed to
represent me and my interests with the money I gave him, I would expect to
have a say in how he spent it. This is the charter of any non-totalitarian
government, and specifically that of all of the modern democracies.

~~~
bokonist
You are confusing ownership with being a customer. Customers pay rent/taxes.
Owners exercise control. The charter of modern democracies promise equal
ownership based on birth or residency, not on whether or not you pay rent. Or
rather, the preamble states the goal of equal ownership. The fine print in the
thousands of pages of legal code give actual ownership to an oligarchy of the
civil service, congressional committees, and organized factions. You may like
to get an ownership share based on paying rent, but you have no legal or moral
claim to it, just as you have no legal or moral claim on controlling your
landlords' spending.

BTW, you are also confusing totalitarian with authoritarian. Authoritarians
deals with the management structure of a government, totalitarian with the
scope of its activities. The US government in 1800 was non-authoritarian, non-
totalitarian. Stalin was authoritarian and totalitarian. USG in 2009 is non-
authoritarian, totalitarian. Louis the XIV was authoritarian, non-
totalitarian.

------
showerst
I'm not quite sure i agree with it, but it's worth at least thinking about the
converse of this argument:

Perhaps we let too many people vote already? The average American isn't just a
little uninformed, but is _provably wrong_ about a number of issues, like what
the government spends its money on, who holds the power to do various things,
and the resources and governments of our neighbors. Heck, I'd bet that a non-
zero percentage of voters don't even understand how the marginal tax rate
works.

We don't let unqualified people fix our cars, work in our hospitals, or teach
our kids, so why should they have the ability to make our political decisions?

Society has plenty of ways to accredit people to be 'knowledgeable' about
these subjects (Basic civics test -> high school diploma -> college degree ->
Degree in econ/poli sci -> masters -> phd, or perhaps business owners, workers
in gov't service, etc).

We already treat voting as a privilege, not a right, (It can be taken away, as
with felons) why not weight votes based on your investment in learning??

Obviously this plan is harebrained in that it would massively disadvantage
everyone other than upper class white people, and probably lead to a civil
war, but it's interesting to think that voting is probably the one place in
society where are an objectively recognized expert in the field (I'm thinking
more on the Econ side than the Poli Sci side) has exactly the same say as
someone who just picks one at random.

The whole idea that some privileged group has the ability to say whether I can
vote makes me a little uneasy, so personally I think I'd give a firm no to the
idea.

If you're interested in the idea, the economist Bryan Caplan wrote a book
called 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' that discusses the common fallacies
and provides hard evidence.
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691138737?tag=bryacaplwebp-20&...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691138737?tag=bryacaplwebp-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0691129428&adid=15GADVSDGSTT9WGRE8F5&);

He also has the single ugliest web page that i've ever seen for an academic (a
high bar indeed): <http://www.bcaplan.com/>

~~~
zacharypinter
I like the idea of there being some sort of investment required for voting.
Everybody interested in voting can, but there's a barrier to entry that helps
people be informed voters or at least passionate about voting.

However, like you, I find it difficult to think of a non-corrupt test. You
certainly don't want SAT scores to be a precondition for voting.

Perhaps in order to vote you have to get x (say 100) people to sign a petition
for you? Of course, community leaders would quickly get a pool of 100 people
to sign for whoever they wanted. You might be able to prevent that by limiting
the number of petitions signed by a person in a given time span.

~~~
showerst
I'd think that you'd just be empowering big organizations (churches, unions,
etc) that can just 'pass the sheet around' at a weekly meeting.

One way that I can think of to do it would be like so: Start a person at, say,
0.6 votes at 16. Voting in a state or national election = +.1/year, up to two
times. Graduation High School or getting a GED = +.1.

So a motivated 18 year old has 1 vote, just like now, slackers are a little
behind but not much.

Graduating College, OR 3 Years of Military Service, OR Passing a (Somewhat
tough) Written Test of Govt/Econ/International Studies = +0.2

Graduate Degree OR 8 (total) Years of Military Service OR Passing a (LSAT
Difficulty) Written Test = +0.2

Graduate Degree in Econ/<Whatever Gov't Applicable Majors> OR 2 Years Gov't
Service = +0.1

So a college grad is worth +20% of a 'normal' adult, but twice a high-school
dropout nonvoter who's put no effort into it. And someone with a PhD in
Economics is only a third of a vote ahead of a college grad, but worth 1.5 18-
year-olds, and 2.5 people who've never voted.

Hopefully by keeping the military/service side roughly equal, we could keep
the ideological balance about the same.

Intelligent, Motivated non-traditional people, especially those too poor or
busy for college could still get to the highest ranks without any cost other
than proving that they understand the basics at rough parity.

You're going to get crackpots with degrees/credentials just like you do now,
but I'd argue that as a whole, educated people make better decisions with
respect to politics (even, I would go so far as to say, in a party agnostic
way), so the bad eggs will cancel out.

I'm a voting, high-school educated college dropout myself, but I'd definitely
go and learn whatever I would need for the highest level, even if it took a
few hours a week for months/years, but I'm also unusually interested in the
subject(s).

Once again, the idea is nuts and would never work in the current system, but
there's nothing wrong with a little thought experiment =).

------
jacoblyles
Heck, I don't think many adults should have the right to vote. Democracy is
irrational enough as a decision-making mechanism as is.

There is tension between a hypothesized universal "right" of voting and the
use of voting as a real-world method of choosing people to govern a country in
a wise manner.

You see this tension when, for example, the ACLU advocates for restoring
voting rights to violent felons. Personally I think violent felons have showed
remarkably below-average decision making capabilities and I don't see why they
should have a voice in running the country. However the ACLU seems to think
that removing their voting rights is an affront to human dignity.

For many, democracy has become religion. It is no longer presented as a wise
way to run a country. It is simply the unquestionable, universal, and only
morally correct method of running a country. That's a dangerously inflexible
stasis point for our thoughts to settle in, but that's where we are.

I prefer to avoid discussions that focus on the moral dimensions of voting. I
would rather discuss how different government schemes are likely to effect
society's well-being. I find these discussions to be much less predictable and
more interesting.

Now, a voting test might be a good idea, and I would love to see it applied to
adults too. Who knows, it might even elevate the level of political debate in
this country to the point where candidates actually discuss substantive policy
ideas. Of course, it would only last until an election cycle where women or a
minority racial group had a lower than average pass rate, then it would be
deemed "evil" and scrapped.

A disclaimer: I got halfway through and stopped when I ran into the giant pile
of steaming kneejerk partisan assumptions (Oh look. A "George Bush is evil"
quip. How original. Did it take a physicist to come up with that?). I'm bored
and disgusted by this level of thinking, and I was somewhat surprised to see
it from someone who argued so intelligently up to that point. So, if there is
anything interesting after that segment, I missed it.

~~~
divia
I agree that violent felons have shown below-average decision making
capability, but as much as I don't necessarily want them having a voice in
running the country, whether there are costs to not letting them do so seems
to be at least an open question. There is a significant negative correlation
between voting and recidivism
([http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...](http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/4/6/4/p104644_index.html)),
though it's easy to see how the causation could run mostly in the opposite
direction.

------
charlesju
I think a better question is how can we send our "kids" to die for our country
when they can't drink or gamble.

~~~
dkokelley
That was the argument for lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. I wonder why
drinking and gambling is still restricted to 21. From what I understand there
is no federal law against it, but if states allow it then federal money is
withheld from the states.

------
ja30278
in a word: no. Rights and responsibility are 2 sides of the same coin. Since
there isn't really a good test for responsibility (unless you're willing to
have marriage or land ownership be qualifications for voting), then age is all
we've got as a marker for responsibility. Probably unfair to a great many
responsible children, but better than the alternative.

------
gojomo
I wouldn't mind an 'earned franchise' for children several years younger than
18, perhaps as young as 12. It could also be partial: only on a subset of
offices (such as lower houses, city councils, and school boards).

And any problems from early voters being especially shallow or manipulated by
others would be offset, in the long run, by, these same voters in their 20s
already having a deeper understanding of the process. A 20something voter with
10+ years of perspective would be better than today's 20something voters.

But I would worry about the combination of public schools and voting children.
The school itself would likely be a polling place, and the pressure to both
vote and vote in ways the school establishment prefers would be very strong.

So I'd slot the 'teen franchise' somewhere a decade after 'diverse and mostly-
privatized K-12 education' on the reform priority queue.

------
lionhearted
Interesting piece. It's been pretty clear to me that age doesn't maturity -
having unique experiences in life causes maturity. The older you tend to get,
the more unique experiences you tend to have. If you ever are fortunate enough
to meet anyone who had to become a head of household at a young age, compare
them against someone a few years older then them and see the results. When a
boy or girl takes responsibility for younger siblings or a parent that can't
function well as early as 14-16, they're a hell of a lot more mature at 18
than most people are at 25 when they're starting to get promoted out of entry
level jobs. No doubt entrepreneurship, becoming a parent, traveling and/or
immigrating, working, leading, managing, and so on add to maturity.

Regardless though, lowering the voting age won't make that much of a
difference. The percent of young people that vote is already abysmal. Related
note: Why don't we have a polling period that lasts at least a few days? Like
Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday?

~~~
jackowayed
It would cost almost 4x as much (let's say 3x as much because you don't quite
need to accommodate as much volume at any one time), and elections already are
pretty expensive.

It also would mean that every polling place would have to keep all of the
records, ballots, etc. safe for longer. Imagine if polling places lost the
records of who had voted already overnight.

~~~
lionhearted
Good call Jack - kind of obvious now that you mention it.

------
bokonist
If you were running a company, would you give the same number of votes to
newest hire in sales, as you would to the two founders? That would be insanity
and would lead to a very dysfunctional company. No one would wish that
management structure upon their worst competitor. But if you wouldn't run a
company that way, why would you run a country that way?

~~~
nazgulnarsil
hear hear. capitalism has been perverted by the mass media so that seeking
profits is now considered a negative thing. but wait a minute, profit means
that customers are buying what you're selling at the price you set. That means
that your company is _producing things people want_. anti-capitalism is an
impossible position. tantamount to saying you don't want people to produce
things that you want.

------
russell
This is a well argued essay promoting that children should be allow to vote,
not on the basis of age, but by demonstrating a grasp of civics and government
by examination, for example. I was skeptical, but he convinced me. If a kid
learns how our government works and what civic responsibility means, why not?
The incentive and prestige of early voting might lead to a more responsible
populace. As he says, with educated children voting we might not have had Bush
the Younger.

~~~
karl11
It bothers me that someone trying to present evidence on whether or not
children should vote needs to throw in political commentary on how voting
minors would have averted the disaster that was George W. Bush. How can
someone be scientifically or philosophically credible if he/she is too
immature to resist political jabs when presenting an apolitical argument? On
top of this, it puts off people who might otherwise be intrigued by the
author's thoughts but aren't after reading unnecessary criticisms of their
own.

~~~
jpwagner
I stopped reading at the Bush comment, not out of offense, but out of
disappointment that I was spending my time reading something that lost its
dignity (isn't this a perfect example of what he alluded to never doing early
in the essay?)

------
nazgulnarsil
screw that, lets take away the ability to vote from adults who act like
children. The founding fathers didn't limit voting to white male landowners
purely for racist sexist reasons. Landowners have a vested interest in the
long term productivity of their region, as well as having shown themselves to
be productive enough to get the land in the first place. On top of that, who
is most affected by taxes? Producers and landowners again.

------
whatusername
If the kid has a part-time job - they have taxation without any form of
representation - which has always seemed wrong to me.

~~~
discojesus
Anyone who's ever bought a Spiderman comic book as a child has been subject to
sales tax without any form of representation. Should we therefore conclude
that three-year-olds should be able to vote?

------
gojomo
Vaguely related: Newt Gingrich's ideas on 'ending adolescence':

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b41070852...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b4107085289974.htm)

I suppose if you're doing serious paid work -- even as an apprentice -- at age
13, you should also have a full civic franchise at the same time.

------
tptacek
Voted up for "merely politically impossible [...], rather than 2 to the
politically impossible power."

------
bliving
I know how this argument would go if only parents could decide!

Remember that the point is for "universal sufferage". While some youngsters
may be responsible enough to vote, I wouldn't trust democracy to most of them.

~~~
jibiki
Ok, would you trust democracy to those who could pass a civics test?

------
discojesus
No, for the same reason children shouldn't have the right to enter legally
binding contracts.

No pre-frontal cortex, no votey.

~~~
discojesus
Apparently someone likes to downvote posts they disagree with without
replying, so allow me to elaborate:

The prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain responsible for executive
function, impulse control, and long-term decision making. Essentially, a
fully-developed prefrontal cortex is what makes an adult an adult. The
prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until your early to mid-twenties
(this is why all of these rights are generally around the same age,
18-21...unless one wants to suggest that we picked those ages out of a hat).

Most children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Therefore it is
in their and society's best interest to prohibit them from making long-term
decisions, since they really don't have the equipment to make lucid choices
about the distant future.

So if you're looking for a criterion for voter eligibility, it should be the
presence of a developed prefrontal cortex, not age, and certainly not a
goddamn civics test (at 17, I would have gotten a hardon at the idea of being
legally able to drink if I only had to pass a written exam testing my
knowledge of alcohol). Since AFAIK we don't have any real, cost-effective test
for whether a person has a prefrontal cortex, chronological age is a passable
approximation.

I'm all for classical liberalism, but let's not be naive and throw common
sense out the window - anyone who thinks 12-14 year olds should have the right
to vote doesn't remember what it was like to be 12-14 years old. Christ, every
single person who I respect and consider intelligent and knew when they were
12-14 would have voted for any candidate who promised that we would see
boobies during their term in office.

~~~
ars
What you wrote _sounds_ really good, and you got upvoted. The trouble is that
it's not actually true.

The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain
one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a
12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.

If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you
assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult.

For every kid it was different, the range is about 12-15, but by then there
were no longer any dramatic differences in maturity, and further changes are
gradual and more importantly life long, i.e. the changes don't magically stop
at 18.

By the traditional age of puberty (i.e. not todays accelerated age) all kids
are mentally mature. But the social environment in the US isn't conducive to
that, instead kids are told you are under 18 so act like a kid.

(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which
is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)

And BTW my experience is supported by literature, at least based on an article
I read about 2 years ago in 'scientific american mind' (which I tried to find
but couldn't).

It's not accidental that the age of majority has crept up and up over the
years. Basically people try to set the age so that everyone is mature by that
point, but of course 95% of people are mature before that - but are told,
don't bother. So they don't and the age creeps upward.

Repeat over the years and it keeps going up. In antiquity majority was 12,
about 100 to 200 years ago it was 15. Today you find 25 years old living like
teenagers used to.

~~~
discojesus
"The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain
one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a
12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.

If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you
assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult."

That's idealistic, naive nonsense, for at least three reasons I can think of
off the top of my head:

1) Take a six-year-old and start treating them as an adult and expecting them
to act like one, and observe their behavior (my hypothesis: the child will
behave like a slightly-more-mature-than-average six-year-old)

2) Do a survey of people who ran away or were kicked out of their houses at
very early ages (let's say 15 or earlier) for traits and psychological health.
(my hypothesis: you'll find significantly higher than average drug use,
addiction, depression, and other psychological disorders than in a random
population).

3) Take a forty-year-old male (who satisfies both of our criteria for
maturity: my criterion that he has a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and
your criterion that society "assumes he is an adult" and treats him like one).
Now remove his prefrontal cortex. Your argument hypothesizes that he will
still be an adult, since the criterion that is important to you - society
treating him like an adult - remains unchanged. However, this has actually
happened many times. It's called a prefrontal lobotomy, and its effects are
well-known - it basically turns an adult into a child. Therefore, the
prefrontal cortex has much more to do with what we know as "maturity" than
social treatment. (and if you want to be clever and say "well those who get a
prefrontal lobotomy are usually severely retarded or mentally ill and thus not
treated as adults before the operation," then just remember good old Phineas
Gage. Treated as an adult right up until the railroad spike went through his
head, and then basically became an impulsive child.)

"(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which
is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)"

Wrong; it is a fact that children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal
cortex. It can take as late as the mid-twenties to come online, and as late as
the early thirties to fully myelinate.

Social expectations have very little to do with capacity for long-term
decision-making. It's biological - you either have the equipment or you don't.
My argument is based on what we know about the brain and on experiments
already performed or whose results will be pretty damn obvious; yours is an
argument by assertion based on blank-slate idealism and one article in
Scientific American Mind which you can't find.

I know which way I'm betting, personally.

------
omnivore
I've always thought they should lower suffrage to kids who can drive,
but...it's not going to happen.

------
ahoyhere
This past election was the first election in Austria in which 16-year-olds
could vote.

All hell did not break loose.

The conservative candidate who actually reached out to the teens got more of
their vote (surprise).

Of course, everyone's been angry with the liberals and socialists who did
nothing but bicker until the coalition fell apart, so that may have something
to do with it, too.

~~~
buugs
But something that works for a multiparty system does not necessarily
translate well to a system with less candidates (or viable candidates). To be
honest it can be argued that obama would have won by a much larger margin in
america given that 16/17 year olds could vote, and though this could probably
show a good thing most people that age do not understand the government nor
any policy action that would be put in place by there vote. At 18 there is
already some trouble in my opinion especially seen by such ad campaigns as
vote or die, or teenagers coming on tv saying I'm voting for so and so because
they are more handsome etc.. you find this much less in older age groups.

------
Allocator2008
Let's remember this is written by the same fellow who is convinced that
Euclidean quantum gravity is a dead end because he feels there is some
fundamental (rather than emergent) property about time that makes it unique.
The vast majority of people who have thought about this believe time to be
emergent, not fundamental. Hell, the Hamiltonian function doesn't even have
time as we know it. So in my opinion this individual has some serious
credibility issues.

That said, he does make some good point on this particular issue about minor's
rights. Maybe lower the voting age to 16? Like if you are old enough to drive,
you are old enough to vote. Of course this would be good for the GOP since
children engaged enough to vote at that age would often be copying their
parents, who could be Rush Limbaugh "ditto-heads" or the like. Nevertheless, I
would be open to allowing the voting age to be 16.

Still though it is astounding to me that people who think time is a
fundamental property are taken seriously in academia. That is sooo 19th
century. I really don't have the _time_ for such folks.

~~~
tocomment
(Downvoted for ad hominin argument)

~~~
RK
I really couldn't tell if that ad hominem was a satire of ad hominem or not...

