Doing stupid things on impulse doesn’t and shouldn’t disqualify _every_ young adult. I read about a grandpa who gave his granddaughter the “volmacht” (no idea what the English word is) for his vote in the last election. She effectively cast the vote. Looking at my daughter of 13, I’m confident she’s world smart enough to make a more sane and well-informed decision than half of the adults I know. I agree to lowering the voting age to 16. Outliers be damned, a very smart group of people is being muzzled while an ever larger growing group (seniors) are getting more say when they, by nature of their age - no blame, have a more short-sighted and less flexible view of the world. Give the kids a vote, and maybe more adults will start to listen.
Maybe a weighted vote? Curious to hear if anyone has any good alternatives :)
I was also that kinda smart well-informed kid - I thought. :)
In retrospect, when I first voted at the age of 18 I was horribly underinformed/undereducated/naive. And at, say, 16 I would have been comparatively speaking so much more naive and susceptible to populism, be it from the left or the right.
There are layers/complexities to politics, and it takes time to understand them.
You do have a point that most adults are also horribly underinformed, but...
I just did a google image search for images of the US Capitol Riot from January this year, and it doesn't look like a particularly young crowd. Looks more middle-aged to me.
The 5 year old crowd kinda lacks the means of transportation to pull these kinda of things of. That doesn’t mean they are wiser than the capitol rioters, just that they have a harder time to do things by themselves. Middle-aged people have both the means to go to events and also the capital to do so.
> Looking at my daughter of 13, I’m confident she’s world smart enough to make a more sane and well-informed decision than half of the adults I know.
Without commenting on the objective intelligence of your child, I think this observation speaks more to either the set of adults you know, or the set of adults in your society in general.
I would feel safer if we focused on resolving the situation where most adults around you were more sane / informed / rational / smarter than a generic 13yo.
I'm saying this somewhat in jest, but this would give disproportionate political influence to families with larger quantities of children. And don't sit here and tell me with a straight face that children will make up their minds independently of influence from their parents. Cough religion cough.
Isn't that the same for the vast majority of adults? I mean sure, maybe replace memes by most recent manipulative news articles, but I don't think it's that different.
I remember my class in high school doing a fake voting session, and sure we made jokes, but most people took it relatively serious.
Maybe a weighted vote? Curious to hear if anyone has any good alternatives :)