Child Suffrage

Let's take the right to vote to its logical conclusion

I’m generally a big fan of Vivek, and am rooting for him in the upcoming election for an array of reasons. But his proposal to raise the voting age to 25 is a half-baked hare-brained idea that doesn’t even work as a thought exercise to get people thinking about civic duty, civic values, or whatever.

The problem isn’t that stupid or immature people have the right to vote. In fact, it’s the opposite. The problem with our democratic process is that our most stupid and least mature citizens are entirely excluded from representation: our children. It’s no wonder that our society has become a senile gerontocracy with socialism for the elderly and chronic child poverty when the former receives representation and the latter does not.

Raising the voting age would only exacerbate this problem, weighting representation even more towards the childless and elderly. The answer is weighting votes according to one’s minor dependents. Those with a larger stake in the future deserve a greater say in the future. And while the wishes of children and parents aren’t perfectly aligned, parents do generally account for the broad interest of their children.

As the global fertility crisis grows more acute, this expansion of the franchise to finally account for new humans couldn’t be more necessary. And while 18 week olds are even less qualified to select candidates than the 18 year olds Vivek is anxious about, the parents of an 18 week old deserve more representation than they achieve in the current system.

Empty nesters, gays, and retirees generally have more disposable income and disposable time to participate in the electoral process than parents with children. And the more children they have, the less time and money they have to compete against the rest of adults in influencing the political process. The current arrangement is structurally designed to do exactly what it’s doing, which is disincentivizing family formation and disempowering future generations.

Is it any wonder that our federal budget borrows trillions of dollars from our nation’s toddlers, given that our nation’s toddlers lack the right to vote and their parents are barely able to make it to the polls, much less bribe and lobby politicians? Most toddlers aren’t even aware of the federal budget, and even the rare child prodigies who are will not have a say in the matter for well over a decade.

Our federal and state governments already track our dependents, with meticulous records confirming which two parents are responsible for every child. I’m not an attorney so I don’t know how it would actually be implemented. But without this expansion of sovereignty, the world our children will actually inherit will be dictated by the glassy-eyed octogenarians and child-free professional activist types who run our current political system.