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One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that pure experience - just raw data in your long-term memory - is a plausible criterion for a good voter. It's not that intelligence and rationality is unimportant, since rational, intelligent people may well draw more accurate conclusions from a smaller amount of data.
What does matter is that everyone, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent, would be better off if they have a few elections and a few media scandals and a few internet flame wars and a few nationally significant policy debates stored in their long-term memory. Even HJPEV needs something to go on. The argument is not just that 18-year-olds as a group are better voters than 12-year-olds as a group, but that any given 12-year-old would be a better voter in 6 years, even if they're already pretty good.
By the same argument, they'd be even better voters 10 years later. Why not give the vote at 30 years of age, say?
Because any experience requirement draws an arbitrary line somewhere, and 18 is a useful line because it's also the arbitrary line society has drawn for a lot of other milestones, like moving out of the house and finishing high school. Voting goes hand-in-hand with the transition out of mandatory formal education and the start of a new "adult life." I think it makes sense that the voting age should be set to whatever age formal education ends and most people move out, but what age those things should happen at is again debatable.
One reason why those lines are drawn together is that, if voting age was much lower than the other lines, then young people would vote the other lines lower too: legal emancipation from their parents, legal rights to have sex and to work, and end of mandatory legally-enforced schooling.
People are unwilling to give the vote to 12 year olds because they're afraid that they'll vote for giving all other rights to 12 year olds as well. And most people would rather keep teenagers without rights.
ETA: on consideration I changed my opinion, see below. I now think it's unlikely that 12 to 18 year olds would be a large and monolithic enough voting block to literally vote themselves more rights.
There aren't enough 12 year olds who would vote that they can vote in things which adults nearly universally disagree on.
Also, people under 18 are already permitted to have sex (though not necessary with people who are much older).
That's true. Although, if they formed a voting block, it would be a significant one. But that's not the real reason why people don't want teenagers to vote.
I think it's more of a feeling of what it means to be a full citizen with voting rights. People wouldn't want to make teenagers into an oppressed minority that was denied full rights because it kept getting outvoted; it would feel unpleasant, scary and antagonistic.
That varies a lot between countries. Very few places have age of consent as low as 12-14 (puberty).
I also would like to note that it would be odd to apply a phrase like permitted to have sex to someone who was otherwise a full, voting citizen.
How about applying a phrase permitted to have a beer to someone who is a full, voting citizen?
The supposed reason for the 21 year old drinking age is that the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of impulse control, doesn't fully mature until the early twenties, and therefore alcohol use before 21 would a) result in more mishaps like car accidents than alcohol use after 21, and b) harm brain development during a critical period. Which would be perfectly sound reasoning if it applied to voting, military service, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc. If alcohol use is too risky because of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, then surely voting is too? But if you raised the voting age to 21 you'd have to raise the draft age, too, because it would be barbaric to send people off to die without even a nominal say in the decision to go to war. It's far more practical to lower the drinking age.
Well for one thing alcohol's effect is to further impair the prefrontal cortex.
Taboo "barbaric".
I won't argue for the 21 year drinking age. For one thing, it was passed by federal governmental overreach (taking money from the states and not giving it back unless they passed a drinking age law).
Combined with your previous statement, that means that adults don't want teenagers to vote because they would vote for other rights, but not out of fear they would actually get them. Which is decidedly odd.
Here's something else to consider: perhaps adults think teenagers shouldn't get those rights for a reason. Furthermore, perhaps most teenagers can't comprehend that reason.
Of course, in making such a statement I need to avoid poisoning the well (I don't want to say that any teenager who disagrees is ipso facto unable to comprehend), but even then, I think it's pretty close to the truth.
(And a smart teenager is likely to think 'I am smart enough and competent enough at making decisions to vote. But I know what a lot of other people my age are like, and they're certainly not like that. I would overall be better off if I couldn't vote as long as it kept them from voting.')
What happens if we extend that reasoning to most adults as well? Is there some reason that most people become magically competent at 18? Perhaps things would be even better if voting were restricted further to some competent class of people?
(Of course that's politically impossible, but it's an interesting thought experiment)
Historically, the usual problem with that is that empowering competent people to make political decisions also empowers them to decide the meaning of "competent", and the meritocracy slowly turns into an aristocracy. The purest example I can think of offhand is the civil service examinations gating bureaucratic positions in imperial China, although that wasn't a democratic system.
If you're asking what the difference is between 18 - 1 day and 18, then that's already been answered: whenever we need to make a distinction based on a trait that gradually changes, we're going to have to set up some arbitrary boundary where the examples on one side are not very different from the examples on the other. The fact that the two sides are not very different is not a reason not to set the boundary.
In most cases, we have no way to determine who is in such a class of people, that is not susceptible to gaming the system, abuse, and/or incompetent and reckless testing. It's pretty hard to screw up figuring what someone's age is.
So why do we treat age as if it functions as one? Genuinely asking.
The problems with restricting the vote by some criterion of competence are:
1) the criterion will get subject to Goodhart's law, this can be mitigated by using straightforward criteria, e.g., age.
2) the people meeting the criterion will act in ways that are in their interest but not in the interest of the people who do not fit the criteria, this is less of a problem with age because children already have adults, namely their parents, who have an interest in their children's well-being.
That seems like a really serious problem. How much better off would children be if they were a special interest group and not their parents?
Is my sarcasm detector broken or something? This experiment has been performed many times in many places, rich white males usually being the prime example of "some competent class".
Actually, I find the Heinlein's idea in Starship Troopers intriguing, where only ex-military are given citizenship.
Excuse me; politically impossible within the current political climate.
If you know of some way to restrict voting to some more competent reference class than "adults", please do so.
History is against you, though, the power-holding reference class has been expanding rather than contracting (non-landholders, women's suffrage, civil rights, etc).
I've thought about it, and I think this is more correct, and I was wrong before. (Or perhaps both reasons are correct, but this one is much stronger).
Historically, minorities who had voting rights but were otherwise legally discriminated against - blacks, gays, etc. - didn't abolish that discrimination by simply voting themselves more rights. They had to fight for those rights by much more direct means.
Acquiring the vote is usually, historically, a relatively early step in the enfranchisement of a minority, and it doesn't help directly in acquiring other rights. (I may be wrong about this; I'm not an expert.) When adults imagine the scenario of teenagers gaining the vote, it pattern-matches the narrative of an oppressed minority more or less violently fighting to gain other legal rights. Adults don't want to give teenagers the vote because it would acknowledge them as an adversary, an independent force. It would give them some (perhaps symbolic) power and simultaneously frame them as opponents.
To go further in this vein: the smart teenager might realize that if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would never have the numbers to influence the political state of affairs in their preferred direction; but if all teenagers were allowed to vote, the majority of them would vote in directions not aligned with the interests of the smart teenagers; therefore the smart teenagers would gain nothing from having voting rights, either way.
That's when you meet the venous valve: using the same argument, a smart adult might object to adults having voting rights, no?
The argument doesn't just require that someone think they're in a category containing a lot of bad voters. The argument requires that they think they're in a category with voters who are comparatively bad, in contrast to people who are outside the category. A lot of smart adults would say "most voters are stupid". But not very many would say "most voters like me are particularly stupid".
Yes indeed. Of course, note that the argument does not apply to only smart adults having voting rights.
Things also change if we think that "smart adults" are a less monolithic bloc of interests than "smart teenagers", which, it seems to me, is the case.
"Might"?
Well, if only smart teenagers were allowed to vote, they would be able to influence politics the same as any other minority--they can have an influence at the margins proportional to their size. The problem is that there's no good way to say that only smart teenagers can vote just like there's no good way to say that only smart adults can vote.
You're implying there's supposed to be an age at which this stops being true?
It's not logically consistent to believe that for all ages X people of age X are worse voters than average. There must be at least one age where the people of that age are better than average--it's a logical necessity, because of how averages work!
I think you are confusing "most other voters my age are stupid" (which people can and do say at any age) and "most other voters in my group are particularly stupid, compared to the average voter".
Actually, I was trying to make a joke, on the basis that the quoted section seems to imply the former.
Clearly I failed.
As an aside, have you considered applying that argument to other groups that were once disenfranchised? I'm not going to say it's wrong, but that particular exercise certainly produces a worrying number of parrallels (similar to applying spaciest arguments to racist ones, as per the parent article.)
There's actually a gradualist solution that never occurred to me before, and probably wouldn't destroy the Schelling point. It may or may not work, but why not treat voting like driving, and dispense the rights piecemeal?
Say when you enter high school you get the option to vote for school board elections, provided you attend a school board meeting first and read the candidate bios. Then maybe a year later you can vote for mayor if you choose to attend a city council meeting. A year after that, representatives, and then senators, and perhaps each milestone could come with an associated requirement like shadowing an aide or something.
The key to these prerequisites IMO, is that they cannot involve passing any test designed by anyone - they must simply involve experience. Reading something, going somewhere - no one is evaluating you to see if you gained the "right" opinions from that experience.
When they're 18 they get full voting rights. Those people who chose not to go through this "voter training" process also get full voting rights at 18, no questions asked - kind of like how getting a driver's license at 16 is a longer process than getting one at 18 starting from the same driving experience.
This way, only the most motivated teens would get voting rights early, and everyone else would get them guaranteed at 18. There is likely potential for abuse that I may not have considered, but I believe with this system any prejudices or biases introduced in teens would be local, rather than the potentially national-scale abuses possible with standardized voter-testing.
This would probably actually not be a bad idea.
... 40? 60?
I'm guessing you're over 30 years old :P
EDIT: to be clear, I'm aware that those don't necessarily follow, I'm just curious where Eugine draws the line and why.
FURTHER EDIT: If more experience = better, and you want the best possible pool of voters, then a "village elders" model springs to mind ... that's a pretty simplistic model, though.
FWIW, I'm under 30 and I still agree with him. (I'm not sure that unilaterally putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and refraining from voting until then when other people my age still vote would be a sane idea, though.)
In the interests of updating my model, did you believe this before reading his argument?
Nah, that just makes your age group even less sane.
Which one? I hadn't read this comment until now.
(I've long suspected that, if we have to decide whom to allow to vote based on age alone, 18 is likely to be a lower threshold than optimal, but I have no strong opinion on what exactly the optimal threshold would be. Probably around the age at which the median youngster becomes economically independent from their parents, give or take half a decade.)
OK, that answers my question. Thanks.