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What do you think the voting age should be? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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About two years ago now, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park writing my initial thoughts on what I didn't know then but would come to know as Youth Rights.

I don't think I'll ever remember why she did, but about halfway through the day Greta Thunberg came to mind, and I looked up the voting age in Sweden. And my blood boiled in a way I've never experienced in my entire life.

16 years old and one of the most famous and recognizable political activists in the world. 16 years old giving a confident, impassioned, admonishing speech to the fucking UN. 16 years old with no legal right to a voice in her country. No voice to vote for the policies she believed in or the people who might enact them.

My writing, already vitriolic to a fault, managed to become even moreso but with the topic abruptly switched to voting. For the first time in my life, I considered where I'd place the voting age if I could do so unilaterally. Not long into considering it I had a thought that I wrote down immediately, a question I've asked well over 100 times at this point with no substantial answer:

When is it reasonable to say to a person, 'If you're not at least this old, then I don't give a fuck what you think'?

And from the moment I had that thought, I have been unable to place the voting age.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (9 children)

I’m conflicted on this. I used to think kids at 16 would be a good counterpart to old people, being more revolutionary in nature and so on. Maybe they don’t have a good sense of how things work in life yet but it would help balance out the people who are so stuck in the old ways that it ends up being fair.

But the reality I see is that they are very easily manipulated by unregulated media like TikTok and would vote for the same extreme right wing party as old people. Surveys here in Germany are a bit disturbing…

Can’t we instead take away voting rights from old people? Also kinda wrong.

How about a voting license that needs to be renewed every 30 years? You have to pass a test that checks if you are capable of thinking objectively or something like that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lots of these voter tests were implemented during the Jim Crow era (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test). Reimplementation would be disastrous for many groups of people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

That's a different test and the rules were flawed because it was obviously made to discriminate african americans. But I'm aware it's not as simple as it sounds to me and leans towards ableist.

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