I say we just give rich people more votes already. That’s exactly what this proposal would do. If you make $100k a year, you get 5 extra votes. At $1 million a year income, you get 25 votes, and another 25 votes for every extra million you make per year. Plus, your net wealth will also net you some extra votes.
I mean, seriously, this is a bad, bad idea. Wealthy people who can afford to spend good money on their kids’ education will just be getting extra votes for their political candidates, as children are by their nature going to do what their parents do by and large.
How is this any different from legions of adults who don’t know what they’re doing electing presidents? Are you terribly worried about vote buying schemes? Do you know how much children cost in comparison to the price of a vote today?
I mean, are there laws prohibiting mentally handicapped people from voting? Or overly impressionable people from voting? No, there aren’t. Clearly barring impressionable, uninformed and uneducated adults from voting is not our top priority. Why should children be any different?
And do you know how much it costs in time and money to raise a child? Do you really think women are going to start birthing armies of babies just so they can vote once every few years (and hopefully do as they’re told – a big issue when we’re talking about people who don’t know what they’re doing and no way for Colonel Dad to verify)?? And my argument is bullshit because I didn’t take the “herd of robot children voters” problem into account??
Expanding rights to second class citizens is ridiculous, but “OMG they’ll breed children as voting slaves!!” is a perfectly reasonable argument?
I seriously doubt that even the rich will be able to get the majority of their 15 year olds to pass a difficult test that requires >90% correct answers. Likewise, I doubt that anybody who wants to vote at 17 (on the 16-18 scale) will have major problems answering 40-50% of the questions, which you could likely do if you’re barely informed.
I don’t think it would significantly, or even noticeably, affect the outcomes of elections (except maybe the smallest local elections). The idea is more philosophical, not practical. In my mind there’s no effective reason to change, nor do I think it will affect politics in any real way, good or bad. I simply like the idea of a boundary being fuzzy rather than hard, I think it’s less arbitrary than a hard boundary, even though in the end it will likely have little to no effect.
The Princeton Review is huge for SAT and PSAT prep. A lot of well-off people send their kids to SAT prep courses to help prepare for the SAT and PSAT. Looking at Wikipedia, they also have prep courses for a lot of other things, including the AP exam. For big tests that are important to the kid’s future, rich people don’t take chances on whether the kid will pass or not. Getting to start voting at age 15 wouldn’t make a huge difference for the kid’s future, but I can see it be done for bragging rights and for something else to put on their resumes and transcripts. I can guarantee you that if the voting test thing came around, that there would immediately be practice tests and prep courses that people would use to get ready for it, and that significant numbers of the 15 year old kids who prepared would pass.
That’s why I made the criteria to pass at that age very high, like 90%. I expect test reviews to pop up, it’s high enough that only a tiny fraction will pass, even with prep. Hell, it doesn’t even need to be a flat 90%, maybe the percentage can differ depending on socioeconomic status, area of residence, racial demographic, or similar – maybe for a poor person living in a slum it’d be closer to 60%.
This idea isn’t about voting – not really. It’s an education incentive. The thing about “bragging rights” is almost right on. People value political power, even if the benefit is so utterly insignificant as to be literally useless. By adding that little bit of power, or for some, that tiny bragging right of “I got to vote early! :)” it encourages them to learn, even though they likely won’t pass. However, the amount of political power it grants is specifically engineered to be negligible – something where while people think they’re getting a leg-up in politics by passing the test, all that’s really happening effectively is people are becoming better informed.
Immigrants undergoing the naturalization process must take a civics test that, among other things, leads to a right to vote. This leads to the enfranchisement of a previously non-eligible part of the population.
The content of that test does not seem to change with the political winds, though there are a few questions (e.g. What is the name of the President, Vice President, one of your Senators, the Chief Justice, etc…) where the answer does change over time.
So just use the civics portion of that test for the OP’s idea. But I would prefer a flat pass score (60% is passing for naturalization purposes) to be eligible to vote before age 18. Or just wait to age 18 and no test required to prevent a Constitutional infringement.
At one point in college, during a discussion about government, I suggested removing the voting age requirement, and someone countered with this argument, that parents would just tell their kids how to vote. I asked everyone who had voted in the last election to put their hands up, and I got about 15 hands. Then I asked everyone who voted differently from their parents to keep their hands up. One person’s hand remained up.
If your worry is that parents will unduly influence the votes of their children, you’re going to need a higher age limit than 18.
Yes, people tend to ideologically and politically identify with the people who raised them, but even if partisanship is bred into them, there’s a difference between choosing to vote (even if very little thought was put into it) and voting being cumpulsory. On what planet could parents round up their 35 year old children, many of whom weren’t even planning to vote anyway, say to them, “Now make sure you vote for Jim,” and that’ll just happen? They’ll either* vote for him on their own, vote for someone else (!!!), or, like about half of people, they won’t vote at all. And then there’s family with three small children who makes voting a family ritual, piling their offspring into the wagon, instructing kindergarteners to make sure to vote Jim.
*We need a word that works as well as “either” for a list of more than two items.
I don’t deny that that would happen, but I doubt it would be a major issue. For one, all the little kids whose parents bring round the polling station to do their bidding would be nicely balanced by the teenagers who vote exactly opposite their parents because “fuck them”, that’s why.
I also think that, as a larger philosophical question, voting rights should be universal. I would gladly accept heavily-parentally-influenced kids voting if it means that civically-minded sixteen and seventeen year-olds have a vote. And once you start deciding who gets the vote and who doesn’t, you get into a really messy place. Because, of course, if you don’t have the right to vote, how can you reasonably change the system?