Currently all democracies disenfranchise all citizens under 18 years old. Why?
I would be in favour of exploring ways of enfranchising children in the same way as we have given the vote to blacks and women.
A simple idea here is to give the vote to all children, no matter how young. In infancy their vote would be exercised by their parents (better child care? better parental leave?). But as the kid grows up they would be entitled to exercise their own vote, just as soon as they had a mind to.
The world is not a friendly place for children (low education budgets, limited recreational facilities, poor wages, long wait for help lines or social security services...) . Giving children the vote will ensure that politicians will pay specific attention to their needs and complete the democratisation of society.
Oh! So you don't think kids have sufficient intelligence or responsibility to be given the vote? These were common views in relation to both women and blacks but they are not heard much now a days.
Get with the times! Give kids the vote!
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Considering the performance of the Bush administration and how the voting public installed it and maintained it through re-election it is conceivable that giving two year olds the vote could not make the situation much worse but frankly the prospect does not enchant me. Even the slightest exercise of imagination brings forth horrors I would prefer not to be realized. Alternatively I do see some use in giving children some political powers which advance with age and are restricted to specific areas but this requires extensive investigation and testing to work out where it might be most useful.
To a degree, I like this idea, but there are lots of problems with it. Married couples do not always agree on politics. This could lead to some ugly power struggles between parents over who gets to decide their child's vote. People with more children would effectively get more votes than people with fewer or none. Ironically, people who are more educated tend to have fewer children on average. On the other hand, people with more children have a greater stake in the future, in a sense. I don't know, it's a tough call.
How about allowing them to vote, and reporting the results, but not "counting" them? It would be like a kiddie steering wheel in the backseat of a car.
I can clearly remember being sixteen and writing editorials for the high school newspaper, railing against all of the privilages that were regulated by chronological age.
You have to be 18 to sign a contract, 16 to have intercourse, 14 to drive a farm truck (in my state), 15 to drive a car, 21 to have a beer, 18 to buy spray paint, do all of these make sense? Since you have to pass a driving test anyway, why does it matter how old you are? Maybe we should have a 'old enough to sign a contract' test too (or is this an emancipated minor test already?) I can readily see that many teens would be more politically informed than their parents. Maybe a 'voting test' would work?
Teens aren't even protected by the Bill of Rights. No free speech, no free press, no right to bear arms, no right to covet thy neighbor's ass--oops, wrong list of ten. You get the idea. It's not fair, but nobody will take up their cause. Usually not even them.
But many teens are really left/liberal, too. Churchill is oft (mis?)quoted as saying 'If you're 25 and not a liberal, you have no heart--if you're 35 and not a conservative, you have no brain. I know teenage kids are more liberal than me. Maybe I don't want them voting...
Right on, legs2041. It's not really an issue of whether kids can "decide" who represents them, it's a question of having any representation at all, of being taken into account by legislators. "If you don't vote, you don't exist." It's been said often enough.
Check out our site: www.strongfamiliesinc.org
The nature of the vote as an institution involves a degree of complexity that is not always taken into account. (a)On the one hand, the vote is most often presented as the free and private choice of a voter among several electoral options, a citizen’s opinion or personal choice. (b)But also, and in the case of the defenseless child this is much more important, the vote serves as a weapon, instrument or resource to defend the citizen’s interests in the democratic arena. Though minors have thus far been excluded because it is considered that, before they are eighteen years of age, they lack the discernment required to exercise their right to vote as expressed in point (a) above, it is however true, and of much greater significance for them, for their families and for society as a whole, that the needs and interests that can only be defended through participation in elections, are as germane to those minors from the moment of their birth, as they are to any other citizen.
Indeed, because of a child’s normally longer life span, the results of an election will affect him or her more enduringly than adults. It is paradoxical then, that it is precisely children who are excluded from the electoral process.
Representation of the minor by his or her parent, guardian, tutor, caretaker or legal representative, is a common and widely accepted practice for the exercise of the minor’s education, estate-related, health-care, or other rights. It is incongruous that this representation should not be applied in the case of the most important of all political rights, preserver of all other rights. This (huge) group of citizens is left unprotected when the time comes to allocate social benefits.