Yes, yes I am. But I’m old enough and experienced enough to know it. And to call Bullshit on it when I see it. Children are neither.
How would adults protect them? Tamper with their kid’s vote? Or tamper with the kid’s choice?
Talk to 'em?
So tamper with the kid’s choice.
You never discuss an upcoming election with anybody? It’s just totally off limits because you don’t want anybody to ‘tamper’ with your choice?
I make it a point never to discuss politics with any underage voting children who may look to me as an authority figure.
Again, I am an adult. I have the knowledge and experience to make an informed decision.
Even if my mama disagrees with my choice.
Even if my best friend tells me I’m wrong.
Even if I see on a TV ad that my candidate will make my daddy lose his job.
Even if my pastor tells the whole church that God, Hisownself, has revealed that my candidate is the Antichrist.
Children do not have the knowledge, do not have the experience, and do not have the filtering mechanisms to make that informed decision.
Because teenagers and children, being less mature and mentally developed and educated on average, are more pliable in the face of even a simple conversation.
So if you can be talked into agreeing with somebody, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote?
I just wonder why, when YOU form or change your opinions, it’s because you’ve objectively considered all the relevant facts, but when a child forms an opinion, it is based on immaturity and outside manipulation? Is there any way to tell the difference? What about all the other decisions we allow children to make? When a 16 year old girls decides to have an abortion, is it because she is pliable and less mentally developed? Or is it her own damn decision, no matter who helps her make it?
DrCube, what are your views on emancipation? Do you think children ought to have a right to leave their parents at any time without some kind of judicial or administrative review?
…
Of course there are 16 year olds mature enough to vote and 30 40 or 70 year olds who aren’t. But the law can’t judge everyone individually. It would take forever, put your rights in the hands of a subjective whimsical judge, and cost a fortune. The law needs a bright line that applies to everyone equally, arbitrary though it may be. The line used to be 21, now it’s 18. It could be some other age, 16 or 19, but it would still be an arbitrary bright line. We’re not going to let toddlers vote obviously, so the line is going to be somewhere. I think 18 is fine, but if you want to argue that it should be 16 or 14, you should lobby for that. But it will still be an arbitrary line.
“Free candy and a skateboard for anyone who votes for me! Watch my music video and you’ll see that I’m the best possible candidate for office! I’ll make it my mission to abolish curfews, drinking ages, school attendence and broccoli! Tell your friends that if they’re really, truly cool they’ll vote for me!”
That’s why kids shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
That’s only marginally more stupid than political ads aimed at adults.
Yeah, adults never succumb to pie-in-the-sky promises from lying politicians. Entitlement programs just don’t happen when mature adults are the only ones allowed in the voting booth. And what’s wrong with abolishing curfews and drinking ages?
Or are you talking about literally bribing voters with free shit in order to make them vote for you? Is that legal? I don’t think it should be.
Past a certain point, yes. But parents have a responsibility to care for their kids, and allowing an 8 year old to live in the streets when you can prevent it isn’t very caring, no matter what the kid chooses. Especially when they can’t enter into any rental agreements, get a job, drive a car, etc. So my solution would be to set the aforementioned legal age to enter into contracts as the age at which kids could leave home without permission. Those younger would be dealt with on a case by case basis, as now.
But a 16 year old who can drive and work absolutely should be allowed to live where he pleases. Believe me, lots of kids are living with their parents until they’re 30 nowadays. Nobody gives up free room and board, and probably laundry, dishwashing and housekeeping services, without a good reason. And whether that reason is good enough is not your decision to make.
Yes, when I make a decision, to a large extent is is due to outside manipulation*. But this is true for anyone. However, as people age from child to adult, their decisions become more and more their own.
Let’s look at this step by step:
[ul]
[li]The voters should be as rational and objective as possible[/li][li]At a certain age, the vast majority of people are as objective and rational as they can possibly be.[/li][li]Before a certain age, the vast majority of people are highly irrational compared to the rest of their life.[/li][/ul]
The first item is, IMHO, an essential element of democracy. And the second and third items are simply a consequence of brain development.
It logically follows that people who are younger than a certain age should not vote, simply to keep the pool of voters more rational and objective.
Now, we have two choices:
a) Implement a highly costly and subjective system to attempt to find the few exceptions to the line
or
b) Bar a few undeserving people from voting for a few years.
And this, this is the part that you do not seem to comprehend. It’s not like anyone is getting permanently disenfranchised. For the people who are on the wrong side of the line, the problem is self-correcting, since time will allow them the vote.
*And I’m 16, so moreso than you, I’d guess.
This is where we disagree.
Or rather, I agree that voters should be as rational and objective as possible. But I disagree that denying people their rights is the solution. We should all speak out about the dangers of irrationality and we should educate our fellow voters whenever we can.
In general, I think education and information is what the government should be peddling instead of bans and restrictions. That’s a blanket statement that applies to almost everything. Drugs, sex, cigarettes, trans fats, etc. And if you think a subset of the population is not rational, you don’t ban them from the polls, you educate them. Jesus, most people would be disenfranchised if “rationality” were the yardstick used to dole out the right to vote.
Okay, so tell me. How does one educate a toddler, besides using time, to be knowledgeable enough to vote?
Got a particular level of ‘knowledgeable’ in mind there?
For me, my yardstick is “Do you care which candidate is elected, enough to get off your ass and register to vote, go to the polls, etc?”. If so, in my world, you’ve got a vote.
Seriously, the majority of voters aren’t “knowledgeable” enough to vote, according to me. Should they be disenfranchised now?
There is no right for children to vote, so they are not being denied their rights.
Should children serve on juries, too?
Government doesn’t grant rights, they just take them away. If you are being governed, you’ve got a right to vote for your representatives.
It’s really simple. The ones who aren’t intersted in voting won’t turn out to vote. The problem solves itself.
No you don’t have to draw a line somewhere. If someone wants to vote, they’re old enough to vote. That line works just fine. Indeed, if kids are so disinterested in the electoral process as you assume, there’s nothing to fear from granting them the vote, since they won’t use it, and thus won’t “corrupt our democracy with their imaturity and ignorance”.
So what you’re saying is that only enslaved blacks had a right to speak out against black slavery. That only women who have been denied the vote have any right to say that women should be allowed to vote. That everyone who actually had political power in those times ought to have refused to wield it on behalf of an opressed group who has none of their own.
I don’t think so.
No, you really don’t.
You know, dispite such contracts being completely illegal to enforce against adults anyway…
How did we ever learn to manage that with who we allow to drive a car?
I challenge every arbitrary age limit. I just figured that I’d debate one issue at a time. If you feel we absolutely must deal with every issue of injustice everywhere before we can make incremental improvements, that’s your business, but there’s zero justification for that position, morally or otherwise.
I say having no age limits beats the alternatives. Why do you think that denying people the right to vote based on their birthday is justified?
Read your quote again. They’re not educated about all the issues and minutae of the laws that impact them. They’re informed about broad issues, which they then designate their representatives to find a way to hammer out the legislation that accomplishes the broad strokes of what they want done.
So you’re using the fact that they are disempowered in one way to disempower them in another way. That seems circular.
Do you object to granting them the vote?
Having an opinion and wanting it to have the force of law does qualify someone to vote.
Having a political opinion is the limit. If you don’t have a political opinion, you have no motivation to vote, so you won’t show up at the polls. I should have thought this would be obvious.
So do you support disenfranchising adults who would vote the same way their parents would?
- The Juvinile justice system is a disadvantage to minors, since they are denied access to a jurry of their peers and all the other tools of due process afforded to adults.
- They still have no part in making the laws that juviniles are subject to, so there’s no meaningful difference in representation.
- The juviniles in question don’t get to decide if they’ll be prosecuted as adults or not, that’s something that the adults get to decide, so the numbers of such prosecutions mean nothing.
What harm would come of extending it to people under your preffered arbitrary-age-line-based-on-nothing of 10-12? Especially since we can’t even mandate they pass this civics class, due to constitutional issues.
Perhaps you didn’t notice, but this isn’t IMHO. Make an argument, or don’t bother posting.
We allow adults to vote for tax-funded candy programs if that’s how they want to use their vote. And we don’t require any particular maturity out of those adults to be “beyond” that sort of thing. Indeed, it’s unconstitutional to mandate such maturity requirements in adults. So why hold children to a higher standard than you do adults?
While I agree that eligibility tests aren’t the answer, since we can’t require them of adults, there’s no justification for a line of any sort. Bright or otherwise. There is no need for people to be “exceptions”. Again, the entire concept of representative democracy assumes that the people are generally dumb, imature, flighty, and uneducated. That’s why we send representatives in instead of voting on the issues directly.
Thus that can’t be used as a justification for denying minors the vote.
That anyone is tried “as an adult” means minors are subject to adult law. They can just be arbitrarily denied access to adult due process protections if they are put through the “juvinile justice system”.
Which seems like it ought to disqualify you from making decisions about who ought to be allowed to vote.
If you consider the abhorence to testing for voting eligibility correct, why do you insist on this back-door, massively inaccurate substitute intended (by your standards) to accomplish the same thing as testing?
I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot by accepting those limits, and I’ll fight you on those when we discuss those issues, but I’m glad to work with you on the rest of it, and it’s good to see not everyone is experiencing a knee-jerk reaction against the idea of true universal suffrage.
And random votes cancel one another out, so no meaningful harm has been done. Though obviously you need people who are voting in order to express a political opinion, not people who couldn’t figure out where the bathroom was, and thought that the voting lever was the toilet flush.
You are aware that this is a rhetorical device intended to demonstrate that declaring someone immature doesn’t actually mean the declaration is justified, nor that that declaration ought to be acted on by denying the person basic rights, right?
Seems to me we should wait until they can actually articulate a political opinion. Once they can make their views understood, they meet the requirements (since voting is impossible if they can’t make those views understood).