Democracy for young people
[David Runciman, political scientist:] So I would lower the voting age to 6 not 16. Because, and I'm serious about that for two reasons. First, it seems absurd but - actually I think I would want people who vote to be able to read so I would exclude reception but maybe year two, or something like that - partly because if the old fear was if you let people vote they will vote for people like them, we know it's not true. So I'm pretty confident that 9 year olds wouldn't elect 9 year olds to Parliament. And even if they wanted to they would be outvoted. So you're not going to end up with 9 year olds in parliament. But also it is the case that we don't have a cutoff at the other end. You get to vote right the way through to the end of your life, regardless of whether you're capable of voting or not. And we're fine with that. We're right to be fine with it. We don't ask people to pass a test when they're in their 90s to see if they're still capable of voting. Of course they should be allowed to vote. And there are suggestions to change the system by introducing various kinds of gradations into it, maybe to give more votes to younger people, to use actuarial tables and try and calibrate the votes are actually rectify this imbalance. That's all insane. You should never never interfere with the basic principle of democracy that connects the ancient world to the modern world, which is one person one vote, and you should never take votes away from people. So again, I know there are people who think, well maybe you should lose your vote once you pass 80, that would also be insane and a recipe for disaster.
So why not? Why not open it up? What the worst that could happen? At least it would be exciting. It would make elections more fun. It seems like a frivolous suggestion. It is partly frivolous because it's never going to happen in a million years. But as a way of capturing just how structurally unbalanced our democracies have become, seriously, why not? Why not six year olds? I don't think there's much harm that can be done because the point of representative democracy is it's basically designed to prevent that kind of harm. But it would at least be different.
source: Podcast 'Democracy For Young People'; www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democracy-for-young-people; Talking Politics; 5 December 2018