this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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It´s important to keep in mind that they don´t want this out of the goodness of their hearts but because young people are their target demographic.
When i was around 16 i would´ve considered this the best idea ever tho.
It being their target demographic is tangential, not the point.
You gain other rights and obligations before the law when you turn 16. When the law recognizes your decision-making capability, why would it not allow you to vote?
Youth has become more mature earlier. Many 16-year-olds are interested and engaged, some take initiative and are politically or socially active. Denying them the right to vote is questionable when there's no clear arguments to do so.
I’m long past 16 and not German, but I fully support this idea.
Would like to see a cap placed on the age of voting as well.
The so called Letztwählerprinzip.
i used to think it was a bad idea, because i know how much learning and growing up 16 years old still need to do. then i grew older and realized how many adults by age never did that.
Also the target semographic argument only works mildly for the green party. The social democrats are as much of a retiree party as the conservatives ans the liberal party only advertises to young people on tiktok and instagram, but their target audience is 30+ multimillionaires driving Porsches
Exactly. If I'm being honest I probably was a more informed (though not necessarily wiser) voter at 17 than I'm now. Of course we can argue that on average it goes the other way and being a new junkie at 17 like I was is most definitely not the norm, but if we let such statistics rule, we'd have to re-think the whole voting system. E.g. in Germany the school system provides a wonderful and easy solution to let only "Bildungsbürger" vote. Or we can argue with the fact that girls and women tend to score worse on tests regarding general knowledge (including the politics category), the male affinity for radical solutions, the fact that the human brain starts decaying it's 30s and so on. But in the end these statistics only give information about groups, not individuals. So I don't feel comfortable with using them as long as there's any significant number of people in that group who are able to make a conscious decision about their vote. That isn't the case with newborns, but it very much is the case with teenagers.
Tl;dr: Give me an attribute and I'll find you a statistic that you can use to explain why people with that attribute should be excluded from voting.