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Comment by qxcv | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Whilst I don't think that voting rights should be taken away from the elderly, I do think that giving a greater range of ages the ability to vote (say, optional voting between 13 and 18) could be beneficial to society. That extra 5 year gap isn't a large enough number of people to reshape the political landscape in most Western nations, but it is sufficient to stimulate a healthy interest in politics at a young age, thus (hopefully) producing better informed voters who can in turn elect better governments.

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I think the best way to have informed voters is to exclude uninformed schoolchildren from voting, personally.

And I think the best way is to exclude people who haven't been inside a school for decades.

Shall we euthanize them and harvest their bodies for food, as well? You're coming across as quite the bigot.

I don't know about you, but I learn more every year, so I imagine by the time I'm 75, I'll know at least three times as much as I know now. I'd give my 75 year old self the vote long before I'd give my 13 year old self the vote.

Nor do I think being in school adequately prepares or informs anyone to be a citizen.

Yeah, cannibalism is totally the sort of thing that I am suggesting.

Diving down a ridiculously slippery slope by jumping from voting to euthanasia is hardly productive to the discussion.

Instead, what would you say about jlgreco's contention that voting power should be given to those who have the greatest stake in the future?

I would say, and did say, that it's horrifyingly bigoted.

I would also say "all adult citizens" is probably the most just way to go about it. Inventing rationales to disenfranchise people is a dangerous way to enable bigotry.

On top of that, if you really want to give voting power to those who have the greatest stake in the future, then you should probably disenfranchise people without living descendants, or potentially give people more votes the more descendants they have. If you die without ever having children, you have no interest in what comes after your lifetime, but if you do have children, you want to pass on a better world and a better country to them. This is doubly true if you have grandchildren, since now you're interested in an even longer term, even after your children die. So why not give people one vote for themselves, two votes if they have children, three votes if they have grandchildren, and so forth, with one additional vote for each new generation added to their family line? This is also radically bigoted and unjust, but you could just as plausibly argue that it does give voting power to those who have the greatest stake in the future while having nearly the exact opposite effect.

Because those children and grandchildren have their own votes.

Regardless of whether you want to take away anyone's right to vote (and I don't), I take jlgreco's suggestion as a starting point for a discussion of the fact that, through politics, much older people have an undue influence on the present and future lives of the young.

You're missing the point. The point is that you can use plausible sounding justifications to disenfranchise anybody, and once you start that game it'll never be played in good faith. Universal suffrage just works.

I also wanted to pry a little into the assumption that people only care about their own well-being and not about anything after their own lifetimes. Actually, people are concerned about the well-being of the children and grandchildren that will survive them. I suspect if you measured it, you'd find that young, childless people are the worst at long-term orientation, partially because they have less reason to be, partially because they haven't had the personal experience of short-term thinking turning around to bite them, and partially because they have less conception of the fullness of time in the first place.

But who knows, right? Either one of us might be wrong, but either one of us can make a pretty convincing-sounding argument to disenfranchise arbitrary groups of people, which in effect means that either one of us will end up trying to disenfranchise whatever demographics vote against us. People used to think there were convincing-sounding reasons to disenfranchise women and blacks, or even people who didn't own land. I'd like to think we've moved past that kind of thing.

Elections are won by convincing the "right" people to get out and vote and the "wrong" people to stay home. Disenfranchisement is already happening.

I would also argue that concern for one's offspring is not sufficient to know what's best for them, let alone the offspring of others.

> Elections are won by convincing the "right" people to get out and vote and the "wrong" people to stay home. Disenfranchisement is already happening.

Yes, it's bad enough what already happens, but that's hardly an argument for making it worse.

> I would also argue that concern for one's offspring is not sufficient to know what's best for them, let alone the offspring of others

Now you're changing the argument entirely, and not in a very promising direction for you. If it's a question of knowledgeability, you've just undermined your entire scheme to give 13 year olds the vote.

In fairness, that was proposed by jlgreco, and I just wanted to use that suggestion to move toward a more practicable discussion of the de facto disenfranchisement of younger voters by the two-party system, higher turnout among older voters, etc.

A possibility I would like to consider for discussion is a multi-tiered legal system in which every ~25 years the new generation starts from scratch with a new set of laws, limited only by a small set of human rights guidelines. People can then opt into whichever generation's set of laws they want, with the ability to switch tiers every year or two, but you can only vote in the tier for your age group.

It's not a fully formed idea and I"m sure one could poke lots of holes in it, but I still think that it would be interesting to discuss in another context (this thread's already long enough that this comment is only an inch wide on the article page).

There's always Jefferson's idea of having another revolution every generation or so.

By this argument, rich people should have 1000:1 vote compared to poor people - their stake in the policy outcomes are far greater, they could lose millions upon millions with tax changes, regulation changes, economy downturns, etc. In fact, by this logic, poor people who don't pay taxes shouldn't be allowed to have voice in anything regarding taxation at all, since they won't be taxed and have no stake in it. You can go very far with this kind of twisted logic. Good thing nobody thinking this way would get anywhere near real power. At least in this regard the American political system yet holds some sanity and doesn't allow disenfranchising people to engineer some or other outcome.

This is actually not that dissimilar from the argument for only allowing free male landowners to vote.

It's bad enough that people are statistically disenfranchised by things like gerrymandering and small states. I can't imagine what it would be like if you let the politicians actually disenfranchise people.

> Diving down a ridiculously slippery slope by jumping from voting to euthanasia is hardly productive to the discussion.

On the other hand, that jump does provide contribute to the conversation by demonstrating the exact reason why wishing for a bartending unicorn would be a better use of my time. That is the exact sort of ludicrous hyperbole you would face if you sincerely brought this sort of proposal to the public. I mean hell, people already bitch about euthanasia when public healthcare comes up.

Any sort of unfamiliar change is absolutely impossible within the confines of the political system we have built ourselves into.

I've made substantial criticisms as well, criticisms that you interestingly ignore. I admit it's hard for me to take your outright dehumanizing bigotry in good faith.

> You're coming across as quite the bigot.

Why is it that preventing the old from voting is "bigotry", whilst preventing the young from voting is merely an act prudence? You must remember that democracy is governance "by the people, for the people", not governance by some arbitrarily selected subset of the people. There is an age below which the majority of people are unable to make informed decisions about political representation (either due to lack of understanding or pressure from third parties like family), but I'm not convinced that 18 is that age.

Mind you, age cutoffs aren't the only way of tackling this problem.

> I don't know about you, but I learn more every year, so I imagine by the time I'm 75, I'll know at least three times as much as I know now.

Unlikely. Net knowledge growth rate usually decreases significantly with age. You'll likely accumulate more knowledge between now and when you're 75, but certainly not three times more[0]. Ask a 75 year-old ;-)

> Nor do I think being in school adequately prepares or informs anyone to be a citizen.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, that was the point of my proposal. I don't think that today's youth take an active enough interest in politics, and I believe that allowing them to participate in the democratic system could increase their motivation to become more informed citizens.

[0]: At least, not by any measurable metric. "Common sense" is completely different.

> Why is it that preventing the old from voting is "bigotry", whilst preventing the young from voting is merely an act prudence?

There are lots of laws that restrict certain rights and privileges to adults only, and for fairly sensible reasons. No one wants to be governed by children. Maybe you want to lower the age of adulthood, and maybe that's possible, but it's something we'd need to do across the board.

There's also the troubling idea that you'd be taking the franchise away from people who already have it, rather than simply not extending it to people who do have it.

Finally, why would allowing people to participate in the democratic system at age 13 make them take an active interest in politics when allowing people to participate in the democratic system at age 18 does not? The root problem is that young people don't really have vested interests yet. They don't have jobs, or property, or children they're sending to school. When the 26th Amendment was passed, they did have the vested interest of not being drafted, I'll give you that, but that went away. Extending the vote to people who have even fewer vested interests won't have the desired effect.

I actually think that lowering the age of majority across the board to around 16 would be a good idea. You'd have to do it sensibly, though. So at age 16, compulsory education is over and you begin two years of national service, but you also immediately get voting and other rights. I can see something like that working.

> Net knowledge growth rate usually decreases significantly with age. You'll likely accumulate more knowledge between now and when you're 75, but certainly not three times more[0].

I was taking that into account, though. I'll probably know two and a half times more by the time I'm 50 ;)

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