[philwelch]

I would say, and did say, that it's horrifyingly bigoted.

I would also say "all adult citizens" is probably the most just way to go about it. Inventing rationales to disenfranchise people is a dangerous way to enable bigotry.

On top of that, if you really want to give voting power to those who have the greatest stake in the future, then you should probably disenfranchise people without living descendants, or potentially give people more votes the more descendants they have. If you die without ever having children, you have no interest in what comes after your lifetime, but if you do have children, you want to pass on a better world and a better country to them. This is doubly true if you have grandchildren, since now you're interested in an even longer term, even after your children die. So why not give people one vote for themselves, two votes if they have children, three votes if they have grandchildren, and so forth, with one additional vote for each new generation added to their family line? This is also radically bigoted and unjust, but you could just as plausibly argue that it does give voting power to those who have the greatest stake in the future while having nearly the exact opposite effect.

[nitrogen]

Because those children and grandchildren have their own votes.

Regardless of whether you want to take away anyone's right to vote (and I don't), I take jlgreco's suggestion as a starting point for a discussion of the fact that, through politics, much older people have an undue influence on the present and future lives of the young.

[philwelch]

You're missing the point. The point is that you can use plausible sounding justifications to disenfranchise anybody, and once you start that game it'll never be played in good faith. Universal suffrage just works.

I also wanted to pry a little into the assumption that people only care about their own well-being and not about anything after their own lifetimes. Actually, people are concerned about the well-being of the children and grandchildren that will survive them. I suspect if you measured it, you'd find that young, childless people are the worst at long-term orientation, partially because they have less reason to be, partially because they haven't had the personal experience of short-term thinking turning around to bite them, and partially because they have less conception of the fullness of time in the first place.

But who knows, right? Either one of us might be wrong, but either one of us can make a pretty convincing-sounding argument to disenfranchise arbitrary groups of people, which in effect means that either one of us will end up trying to disenfranchise whatever demographics vote against us. People used to think there were convincing-sounding reasons to disenfranchise women and blacks, or even people who didn't own land. I'd like to think we've moved past that kind of thing.

[nitrogen]

Elections are won by convincing the "right" people to get out and vote and the "wrong" people to stay home. Disenfranchisement is already happening.

I would also argue that concern for one's offspring is not sufficient to know what's best for them, let alone the offspring of others.

[philwelch]

> Elections are won by convincing the "right" people to get out and vote and the "wrong" people to stay home. Disenfranchisement is already happening.

Yes, it's bad enough what already happens, but that's hardly an argument for making it worse.

> I would also argue that concern for one's offspring is not sufficient to know what's best for them, let alone the offspring of others

Now you're changing the argument entirely, and not in a very promising direction for you. If it's a question of knowledgeability, you've just undermined your entire scheme to give 13 year olds the vote.

[nitrogen]

Now you're changing the argument entirely, and not in a very promising direction for you. If it's a question of knowledgeability, you've just undermined your entire scheme to give 13 year olds the vote.

In fairness, that was proposed by jlgreco, and I just wanted to use that suggestion to move toward a more practicable discussion of the de facto disenfranchisement of younger voters by the two-party system, higher turnout among older voters, etc.

A possibility I would like to consider for discussion is a multi-tiered legal system in which every ~25 years the new generation starts from scratch with a new set of laws, limited only by a small set of human rights guidelines. People can then opt into whichever generation's set of laws they want, with the ability to switch tiers every year or two, but you can only vote in the tier for your age group.

It's not a fully formed idea and I"m sure one could poke lots of holes in it, but I still think that it would be interesting to discuss in another context (this thread's already long enough that this comment is only an inch wide on the article page).

[philwelch]

There's always Jefferson's idea of having another revolution every generation or so.