Abstract
No citizen should be denied the right to vote due solely to her age. We can see this by showing that all objections to it fail. It might be objected that it is not unjust to so deprive children because children as a group are unintelligent or irrational, have their interests already represented by the parents, or are justly deprived of many other rights (e.g. the right to serve on a jury), among other reasons. But all these objections fail because (1) there is no evidence to support it, (2) even if true, this would not justify disenfranchisement, or, most prominently argued here, (3) they deprive individuals of political rights based upon their membership in a group. The voting age should be abolished.
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Notes
- 1.
Others have argued that a parent should be able to have an extra vote for each child on the grounds that while children are entitled to be politically represented, the parent can exercise this vote as the child’s representative. A parent would then have multiple votes. See Paul Demeny, “Pronatalist Policies in Low-Fertility Countries: Patterns, Performance and Prospects,” Population and Development Review, 12 (supplement) (1986): 335–358. There are many problems with this proposal, not the least of which (1) a child’s parents frequently disagree politically with each other, (2) many children have parents who lack citizenship or the right to vote, and (3) many children are orphans. There have been proposals to cope with some of these problems: allow the parent of the same gender as the child (fathers for boys, mothers for girls) exercise a proxy vote on the child’s behalf, letting each parent have half of the child’s vote, and others still. But besides adding an extra cumbersome element to the voting system, these proposals do not entirely eliminate the injustice I am arguing our current system embodies.
- 2.
One could question this, I suppose. Do children ever successfully pressure their parents to vote differently, to vote, or to not vote?
- 3.
In fact, it is not valid: it draws a conclusion about all children from premises concerning only children who have parents. A similar difference arises in my analogy, for not all women have husbands.
- 4.
Andrew Rehfeld, “The Child as Democratic Citizen,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 633, no. 1 (2010): 141–166.
- 5.
Intelligence is not the only trait that one might list here. One might instead list rationality, or being well informed, or having experiences of a certain sort. To make the presentation of certain structural features of all of these arguments clear and simple, I select intelligence as the trait in question, but what I say applies to other possibly more plausible traits.
- 6.
I leave open what counts as “properly.” I do not mean “so as to vote for the objectively best candidate.” Obviously, children who vote can do that. Nothing easier.
- 7.
In 2008, the election for the state representative of Alaska House District 7 was determined by one vote. In 2015, the election for the state representative of Mississippi Legislative District 79 was a tie. There are probably some other such examples, but extremely few are similarly consequential.
- 8.
Bob Dole barely lost the white vote.
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Wiland, E. (2018). Should Children Have the Right to Vote?. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_17
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