This is fascinating - I'm not particularly sold on this line of reasoning to begin with, having both secret balloting and the privilege to have been able to dramatically disagree with my parents politically as a child. Certainly by high school the majority of my classmates were qualified to vote.

Yes and I wonder if media consumers should lose the right to vote too, since their opinions will often be strongly influenced by the media that they read - effectively Murdoch has millions of votes even though he isn't a citizen of this country any more. Surely the only independent people are the MP's themselves, and so they should be able to vote for whomever they please.

Would be an interesting study to conduct, most families I know vote similar but is that actually the case and does family influence how you vote or does who you vote for influence who you live with as family?