this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
As opposed to adults?
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.
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.
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.
The same argument can be made for people of any age.
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.