About two years ago now, I was sitting on a bench in Central Park writing my initial thoughts on what I didn’t know then but would come to know as Youth Rights.
I don’t think I’ll ever remember why she did, but about halfway through the day Greta Thunberg came to mind, and I looked up the voting age in Sweden. And my blood boiled in a way I’ve never experienced in my entire life.
16 years old and one of the most famous and recognizable political activists in the world. 16 years old giving a confident, impassioned, admonishing speech to the fucking UN. 16 years old with no legal right to a voice in her country. No voice to vote for the policies she believed in or the people who might enact them.
My writing, already vitriolic to a fault, managed to become even moreso but with the topic abruptly switched to voting. For the first time in my life, I considered where I’d place the voting age if I could do so unilaterally. Not long into considering it I had a thought that I wrote down immediately, a question I’ve asked well over 100 times at this point with no substantial answer:
When is it reasonable to say to a person, ‘If you’re not at least this old, then I don’t give a fuck what you think’?
And from the moment I had that thought, I have been unable to place the voting age.
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Perhaps it should be decided by a cognitive test instead of age. This is a dangerous road though, because a lot of people with cognitive disabilities can and should be allowed to vote for themselves.
Maybe the test could be made to test if a person understands what an election is and them being able to form their own opinion.
The main issue isn’t age, but rather that a lot of people vote for something that they think others expect them to vote for without ever forming an opinion of their own.
However those people should also be allowed to represent themselves, so I think all elections ought to have the option of voting for “shit, I don’t know, I have no idea what’s this is about”, and if that vote came over a certain threshold, then the election should be void and postponed for a week.