14. February 2015 · Categories: Politics

In our modern democracies we typically give all citizens from age 18 the right to vote, until they die. Even when they have dementia, they keep the right, and their legal representative may vote for them. Predictably this has led to policies that favor the old and gets the young shafted. Therefore it is time to extend the vote to every citizen. Since 18 is a good age where you are informed enough to vote, parents should cast the vote for the younger ones.

I believe a reasonable set of rules for the kid vote would be the following:

  • you get the vote when you are 6 months old

    This is long enough to make sure registration has happened, and prevents differences because some bureaucracies are more efficient.

  • only a legal representative who also has the vote itself may cast the kids vote

    This is to prevent an outcry for children born to foreign parents. These can designate a citizen they trust to cast the vote for their children.

  • if there are two caretakers, typically mom and dad, then each gets a half vote for each kid

    A bit more complicated to count, sure, but you prevent fighting between the parents how to cast the vote. Especially you prevent strong arming to twist the vote in one partners favor, or that the courts need to intervene to get to a vote when there is a stalemate which prevents the vote from happening.

The risk with this is of course that we get even more votes for people that are not working, which could increase the pressure to implement costly programs such that the tax load becomes suffocating. But I believe that we have strong enough safeguards against discrimination for that to become a big problem.