It's always insidiously attractive to deny voting rights to groups of people who, in our own opinion, do not have good character or good judgement. It certainly sounds clever to say we're implementing rules so only the best and the brightest can vote which (we argue) will lead to better decisions and a higher caliber of elected leaders. And in fact such arguments often have carried the day and lead directly to such policies being implemented. In various places and at various times, women, ethnic and religious minorities, felons, unmarried males, landless people, people who could not pass a reading test, and many other small powerless groups have all been denied the right to vote. However, the result has never been "smarter" political decisions and "better" governance, but only ever the political oppression of the disenfranchised group.

It makes more sense to view voting rights as political capital that forces politicians to care about the needs of particular voting blocks then as a ticket to participate in some impartial decision process. The implication of this point of view is this: to get a more equal society, or at least to prevent certain extreme example of inequality, we need to make sure that as many people as possible have the right to vote.

The process of deciding who can and cannot vote is also fraught with moral hazard and the potential for corruption. A literacy test before voting sounds reasonable (if you believe we only want smart educated people voting) but it leads to corrupt situations like this:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...

This is a rare example of a real slippery slope: once you start the process of identifying small "undesirable" groups to disenfranchise, the process is unlikely to stop in anything short of full blown dictatorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your line of thought, but removing the right to vote from ANY group is dangerous idea. People always vote in their own best interests, typically for the now/near future. Imagine social security and medicare being ended overnight. Not only would there be a lot of homeless/starving seniors, but, in 20-30 years when the current voters aged out, nobody who was eligible to vote would care enough to help them. This would likely end up as some quasi Logan's Run type scenario.

This is absolutely not a voice in favor of the mentioned programs, just used as an example.

So, what you're saying is, people who have 40 years more experience of life than you have, people who've paid taxes for most of those years, people who sacrificed a better lifestyle so they could change your nappies, etc shouldn't vote because their political opinions don't chime with yours?

You don't know it yet but a lot of what you think you know stems from fake news too.

Really ageism is an area of accepted double standards - denying Alzheimer's patients the right to vote is considered absurd yet even college graduate minors cannot vote despite being proven more capable than average. Or rare absurdities like a minor charged as an adult who managed to get acquitted in spite of the situation's seriousness isn't allowed to vote because of lacking the capacity.

Holding the elders to the same rationale is fair if not just - the situation isn't just for anyone affected but they aren't getting special treatment. To give an absurd example executing people for jaywalking is unjust but doing it to all regardless of station is fair.

I believe in keeping voting sancrosanct mind you but I can see a rhetorical and logical point to it.

Ah, the old "we changed your nappies so we know better than you" argument.

Do they have 40 years of experience, or one year of experience 40 times?

Not sure what your point is?

Wow. Should we also say that people younger than 30 should not vote because they do not have the life experiences necessary to make rational decisions?

Or maybe children should vote, since they have all the future ahead of them. If there's a reason why education is ignored so much by governments it's because children don't vote

"as president, I will give free lollipops to every boy and girl who votes for me"

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, we've gone from "big tent" to "white van" politics.

I know, I was being facetious.

However, the bit on education I still believe it to be true

Head of politics at Cambridge suggests 6 year olds should be given the right: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/06/give-six-ye...

"Hey, why is it that socialist ideas are so unpopular with adults who have life experience?"

Don't worry, they're already opting out on their own[0]

[0] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voti...

People aged 18 to 30 should vote.

I'm not sure this is fair to all people over 65. It sounds like maybe your relatives are much like mine, and I agree, my relatives shouldn't be voting either.

If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.

It's quite frightening to see how popular this education barrier to voting idea is. Another one I've heard is that everyone should make a test before being allowed to vote.

I'm inclined to support educational qualifications for elections supervisors and poll workers, not voters, and while we're there, forcing open source/open inspection ballot counting systems. Isn't it long past time to deal with the ineptitude problem and corrupt canvassing at the source?

Let's just go all the way and narrow it down to landowners. If we're removing suffrage those idiot olds, why stop when we can get rid of it for those pesky poors too?

So under-represented or disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to meet the education standards don't get to vote? Education requirements can very easily become a proxy for race/class.

> So under-represented or disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to meet the education standards don't get to vote? Education requirements can very easily become a proxy for race/class.

Easily become a proxy for race/class? They already were used to disenfranchise people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

> From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions and extra-legal activities (violence, intimidation)[2] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.

I know people with masters and doctorate level of education in medical and chemistry and other highly technical fields who believe in UFOs, creationism (the 10,000 year old Earth variety), among other things (I even once met a physicist who thought everything about quantum mechanics was bunk and classical mechanics could explain everything). And I'm by no means alone in that. So that may be anecdotal experience, but enough anecdotal experiences among enough people... So I don't think education means what you think it means. That is, it really is about an ideological test, the assumption by certain people being that education, for one reason or another, is selecting specific traits or inculcating certain traits that happen to be the same traits that any given person in such a position, such as yourself, think are somehow common among that group and that should somehow bestow a privilege greater than they do. It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.

>I know people with masters and doctorate level of education in medical and chemistry and other highly technical fields who believe in UFOs, creationism (the 10,000 year old Earth variety), among other things

There should be a registry of doctors who are creationists or believe other nonsense (I'll give the UFOs a pass depending on just how fervent their belief in them is; I mean, can you prove we haven't been visited? The evidence isn't very good but you can't prove a negative. If they believe they've been abducted, however, that's a whole different level. Of course, I also can't disprove their claim but I'd rather err on the side of caution and assume they have mental problems and find another doctor.).

I don't want a doctor giving me medical advice when they don't even believe in basic science.

>It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.

Perhaps, but I think it should be obvious by now that people who decided to vote for Trump have had an extremely detrimental effect on the nation's economy and well-being.

Great, then we can rule out the people with the wrong sort of education as they make poor voting choices, and the people from the wrong sort of colleges, and the wrong sort of courses...

People can be hugely educated and aware on some topics whilst being ignorant, blinkered and bigoted on others. You and me included. Plenty of highly educated people voted for the choice you didn't. Even in those recent "surprise" elections, be that Trump, Brexit or the more recent Brazilian election.

If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance. Which may bring the added advantage of not yet being inculcated in the binary certainty of party tribes.

>If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance.

As I pointed out in another post here, I personally do NOT think the problem is age, despite the thrust of this article. As I said before, the alt-right is not full of geriatric people, it's full of men in their 20s-40s, mostly men with poor education.

As a man in that age group myself, I hate to say it, but I think the country would actually be better off if only women (of all ages), and men over the age of 60 could vote.

The reason why democracy works is not that it generates the best decisions, it works because it makes the least amount of people unhappy.

Archive this. When you reach that age, find your mind likely still nimble, read it.