DanArmak comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong
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12 year olds are also highly influenced by their parents. It's easy for a parent to threaten a kid to make him vote one way, or bribe him, or just force him to stay in the house on election day if he ever lets his political views slip out. (In theory, a kid could lie in the first two scenarios, since voting is done in secret, but I would bet that a statistically significant portion of kids will be unable to lie well enough to pull it off.)
Also, 12 year olds are less mature than 18 year olds. It may be that the level of immaturity in voters you'll get from adding people ages 12-17 is just too large to be acceptable. (Exercise for the reader: why is 'well, some 18 year olds are immature anyway' not a good response?)
And taking away the vote from demented people and people with low IQ has the problem that the tests may not be perfect. Imagine a test that is slightly biased and unfairly tests black people at 5 points lower IQ. So white people get to vote down to IQ 60 but black people get to vote down to IQ 65. Even though each individual black person of IQ 65 is still pretty stupid, allowing a greater proportion of stupid people from one race than another to vote is bad.
I'd like to add this to the other posters' responses:
Please taboo "immaturity" for me. After all, if taken literally it just means "not the same as mature, adult people". But the whole point of letting a minority vote is that they will not vote the same way as the majority.
How is this different from saying that no test of 12-year-olds for "maturity" is perfect and therefore we do not give the vote to any 12 year olds at all?
It isn't all that different, but all that that proves is that we shouldn't decide who votes based on maturity tests any more than we should on IQ tests.