why have a minimum voting age?
why have a minimum voting age?
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It's unlikly the youth vote would be all that is needed for a politician to gain office, and pop cultural idols vary not only with age but with social group as well. we could get a Marylin Manson type politicians if older folks would vote for him. Really though, the only thing that would change is that youth would be better represented, rather than end up with even worse politicians than we have now(which tend to be a partially due to how its damn near impossible to get rid of too many of them, might be easier with the youth vote available) . we also won't have second class citizens to the degree we do now. There's little logic behind it. I'd say the best argument against a minimum voting age is that people who don't have kids will have less of a voice than people who do have kids. And when that's the issue, we will have a Democracy that represents the parenting types more than the non-parenting types. Parenting types will tend to be more concerned with how society is forming... this could end up being bad. 1
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That is assuming parents have a high level of impact on a child's politics. Society as a whole tends to insure that the dominate political ideology stays dominate with minor modifications, hence why nearly everyone in America is one form or another of liberal but within families there tends to be a lot of diversification within liberalism. Of course we need a minimum voting age, because the vote is linked with the idea of ability : we must be responsible for our acts, being a good citizen is essential for practicing the vote. However, couldn't we think that in most of developed countries (in democracies), people are well educated : in this case is there a difference between voting at 15 or at 18 if these young people realize how important and why it matters to vote ? 1
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There really isn't much of a difference between voting at 12 or 8 vrs voting at 90 or 110, nor is there much of a difference with voting at 40 or 30. Youth are perfectly capable of expressing their desires. In many societies they are desires based on short term goals most of the time, the same as adults. Just because the environment is different doesn't mean the very basic ability to reason has changed. Voting isn't multivariate calculus applied to probabilistic and chaotic models(which is actually pretty easy). It isn't that children are not "responsible",(what ever that means in this context when compared to older people) or that they are unable(again what ever that means when compared to older people) that we have a minimum voting age today, it is due to the fact that most politicians and the legal system are rigged against the youth for political reasons. The core nature of "ability", "responsibility","knowledge" don't change very much with age for the great majority of people. 1
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