Voting Youth

Who is Voting Youth?

Voting Youth is a group of people of all ages who believe that people under 18 should have the right to vote.

Why do people under 18 have the right to vote?

In a democratic society, one should by default believe that all citizens have the right to vote, and be very skeptical whenever it is claimed that any group of people should not. Voting rights are important because when a group of people does not have them, politicians have very little incentive to care about that group's welfare and the issues that affect that group. We believe that all attempts at justifying the denial of people under 18 their basic voting rights fall apart pretty quickly when you take a look at them.

Shouldn't voting be tied to taxes?

There are plenty of people over 18 who do not pay many or any taxes for one reason or another. If you're going to deny young people their right to vote because they don't pay taxes, you have to come up with a reason why these adults should have a right to vote but not them. Or you should start advocating for non-tax-paying adults to lose their voting rights.

But young people are mostly idiots!

There is no intelligence requirement for an adult to be allowed to vote; all they are required to be able to do is express a preference. Donald Trump could get a concussion and still be allowed to vote. Why should young people have to meet an intelligence requirement if adults don't have to? If your goal is to establish a system where only "smart" people are allowed to vote, you'd be better off advocating for poll tests or something. You would be able to define "smart" however you want and disproportionately disenfranchise whatever group you want to disproportionately disenfranchise. There's a good chance that young people as a whole agree with you more often than a few states' worth of adults do, so if your goal is to disenfranchise a large group of citizens based on them being "bad" at voting, it would make more sense to disenfranchise a state. Go argue, depending on your leanings, that the entire states of Mississippi or New York are so stupid that they should be denied voting rights, because that would make more sense.

But young people are influenced by their parents and teachers and whatnot!

Yes. Adults are, as well. Since when are you only allowed to vote if your preference is an original idea you came up with?

Their interests are already being taken into consideration by their family members who love them and can vote.

I'm sure that women's interests are already being taken into consideration by their husbands, so they don't need the vote either. Ask yourself, are adults really taking into consideration their interests? We haven't done much of anything about climate change, for one.

But don't we have to draw a line somewhere?

You might think it's ridiculous to insist that babies be allowed to vote. Agreed, it is ridiculous. It is also ridiculous to insist that babies be prevented from voting. Babies aren't going to express a desire to vote either way, so it doesn't really matter whether they have the right to vote. It's easiest to say "no voting age" because there is no downside to drawing the line lower than it needs to be.

There are other universal rights, such as the "right to remain silent" which have not needed a minimum age. It's not a problem that babies have the right to remain silent if they are arrested, because babies do not get arrested. The voting age would join these other rights as a universal right with no minimum age.

But what about parents manipulating their children and using them to gain extra votes for themselves?

Our election system is prepared to deal with these concerns because we have long dealt with analogous concerns for elderly people. And we do not let concerns of people manipulating elderly people for votes convince us to instate a maximum voting age, because we recognize that denying elderly people their basic rights would be far more egregious than any hypothetical manipulation.

Our voting system is designed to be anonymous, so there would be no way for an adult to follow a young person into a voting booth to force them to vote a certain way, just as adults are not allowed into voting booths with other adults to force them to vote a certain way. And gaining a single vote for your candidate is not a huge incentive for a parent to want to manipulate their child.

On the other hand, if the outcome of an election should reflect the interests of all citizens, a parent voting twice, once for themselves and once for their child, may lead to a more representative outcome than one where a parent votes once and a small child does not have their interests represented at all. So, for this reason, it might actually be a good thing if parents got "extra votes".

If that were the goal, you could use a system of proxy voting. Under such a system, parents would be allowed to vote on behalf of their children if those children did not choose to vote themselves. This would remove any incentive for parents to manipulate their children into voting specific ways, because they could get that "extra vote" themselves without having to do the manipulation.

Finally, please keep in mind that adults instilling political values in their children is a thing that already happens.

How do I participate in Voting Youth?

Check out our volunteer page: Volunteer, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our newsletter.

What books, blogs, etc. would you recommend to learn more about youth rights?

Here's a list! Youth Rights Stuff

What is the Voting Youth stance on X youth rights topic?

Voting Youth is exclusively focused on the right to vote. There is no official Voting Youth stance on any other topic, including other youth rights topics like the drinking age or the driving age. There are a few reasons for this:

• To unify the group around a single goal, instead of getting distracted by the endless complexities of youth rights in general.

• To avoid splitting efforts between too many causes and not being effective with any of them.

• Voting rights are perhaps the most important rights to fight for, as they will help young people to demand other rights.

We are not affiliated with any particular political party or ideology. We welcome people of all backgrounds from across the political spectrum.

Why is no voting age better than 16-to-vote?

People under 16 deserve voting rights just as much as people between 16 and 18.

Why not support 16-to-vote first, for strategic purposes?

That's simply a bad and even counterproductive strategy.

• 16-to-vote is not an exciting message. It is designed based on the idea that the meeker the proposal, the more likely that politicians are to agree to it. This is not how things work, politicians do not say "Wow, how reasonable you are, since you watered down your idea until it barely does anything and none of my constituents care about it any longer, of course I'll support it." Politicians (ideally) do things because they feel pressure from their constituents demanding them. Which means the first step is not to appeal to the politicians but to come up with a proposal that the politicians' constituents feel strongly about. If you follow the logic of 16-to-vote further and change your slogan to "17-years-and-364-days-to-vote" thinking that "We're being so reasonable now that there's no way politicians will disagree with us!" you're going to be disappointed. Politicians would feel even less pressure to enact "17-years-and-364-days-to-vote" than they current feel to support 16-to-vote because nobody would feel passionately enough about "17-years-and-364-days-to-vote" to demand it, or to reward them with praise if they obtained it.

• Very few people are between the ages of 16 and 18, and nobody is between 16 and 18 for very long. People are most motivated to fight for things that will make a positive difference in their own lives and the lives of people around them. Drastically reducing the number of people affected drastically reduces the number of people with a reason to care.

• Arguments in favor of 16-to-vote are weak. They are built around naming some things that happen around age 16, and claiming that these things are somehow relevant to voting rights. But why not name any other age and start naming random things that happen at that age? When you arbitarily choose the number 16 and start listing random things that happen at that age as "reasons", you're communicating that it's OK for other people to arbitrarily choose other numbers, say 18 or 21 or even 25 or 30, and start listing random things that happen at those ages as "reasons". It may seem like it should be easier to convince people of a "less radical" position than of a "more radical" one, but not if that "less radical" position doesn't make any logical sense.

• It takes a lot of work and luck to make as huge of a change to society as abolishing the voting age. Doing this in multiple steps requires you to do all of that work and get lucky multiple times. Once to lower the voting age to 16, and a second time to abolish it. Or, if the plan is to insert even more intermediate steps, maybe once for 16-to-vote, once for 14-to-vote, once for 12-to-vote, etc. Why create more work for ourselves?

• Some people support 16-to-vote, others say that doesn't go far enough and argue for 12-to-vote, still others say 14 or 15. It's confusing to the people you're trying to convince when everybody's picking a different favorite number at random.

• If 16-to-vote somehow passes and we say, "OK, now on to the next step, now we'll advocate for an even lower voting age" or "OK, now we'll advocate for there to be no voting age", our own arguments from 2 weeks ago when we pushed for 16-to-vote are now going to be convincingly used against us. They're going to come back to haunt us. With something like the minimum wage, you can advocate for a $15 minimum wage for a while, then later up it to $20 or $25, and justify the change in your position very reasonably by citing inflation. There is no such reasonable explanation for changing your story from 16-to-vote to a lower age. If you previously argued that the voting age should be the same as the working age, now you're going to have to argue that the voting age should not be the same as the working age, a completely different and contradictory position. You may have to replace all of the leaders of the successful 16-to-vote movement with new leaders, because all of their credibility would be gone.

• Being lumped in with older teens may be the best shot that younger teens and children have of obtaining voting rights. Imagine that the current voting age was 30, and we were proposing a complete abolition of the voting age. That would appear a lot easier to accomplish, because we would have a large group of highly-motivated people in their twenties on our side. Instead, the voting age is 18, so most people in their 20's don't care. If the voting age were 16, 16- and 17-year-olds would be less motivated to care, and without them, abolishing the voting age would be even harder.