this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
63 points (86.2% liked)
Asklemmy
44133 readers
1023 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I could wave a wand and fix something about voting in the US, it would be to improve access for already qualified voters.
Kids would vote similarly to their parents in general, so lowering the age means people from groups/locations that have good access would have more votes (not a bad thing) but groups/locations with poor access would still have poor access, possibly even worse access because of the increase in voters. So yeah, fix access first or it only exacerbates what I consider to be a larger issue in need of addressing.
Assuming good access to voting though, 18 makes sense to me as the time a person is an adult and legally responsible for themselves. I would be open to arguments for younger, it's just not something I ever felt passionate about, even when I was under 18 years old.
Just like women vote the same as their husbands? We'll practically double the line length at the polls if we give women the vote, and their votes won't really matter, because it's the same as if their husbands or fathers just voted normally. Not worth the effort.
Not being an ass, it's just that every single argument I've ever seen against lowering the voting age has been almost identical to the arguments used against women voters back in the day. I'm not suggesting you're against women having the vote, just that the arguments are similar, and pointing that out helps to demonstrate why they might not as strong as some would think. Teenagers are also notoriously capable of disagreeing with their parents on political issues. It's sort of a thing with them often enough.
Totally agree about access to voting. Automatic registration at 16, coting day a national holiday, polls should be open for at least a month, with every post office a polling place, and government run bussing to and from polling places, and mandatory paid time off for wt least 1 day in that month. Universal suffrage. Including incarcerated people. Honestly, nothing should be able to interfere with your right to vote. I go back and forth on compulsory voting, but tend to lean towards it. And this is coming from an Anarcho communist, who doesn't generally believe we're ever going to fix things through the ballot box.
No one's fighting for teens to be recognized as adults at 16, and they will all have the right to vote in two more years, so I don't see the parallel at all to the women's suffragist movement who couldn't ever expect to vote, married or not, and were part of a broader campaign for women's rights. If there was momentum to make 16 the age of legal adulthood, it would make sense that voting would be a part of it.
16 is arbitrary. Not linked to any legal status. Not linked to the age at which one can work and pay taxes. Not linked to any milestone being identified. Like I said, open to arguments but it needs to be better than "younger than 18, set it at an aesthetically pleasing number... 16 will do."
The most convincing arguments I see are about being able to vote for the president who could draft you, so theoretically voting at 14. But my preferred condition, and where I would throw any activist energy, would be to get rid of the draft entirely.
I'm also against compulsory voting. Absolutely against it in current state with all the access issues we've agreed upon. Even with perfect access though, declining to vote can be a political statement in itself.