I agree with JD Vance that kids should get votes. My disagreement with him is that these votes should be cast by the kids and not given to the parents. In my previous essay, I argued why parents should not get these “extra” votes. In this essay, I will argue why kids should get to vote.
On the face of it, there should be a presumption of voting rights: each citizen of the United States should have the right to vote unless an adequate reason is given to deny a person this right. In terms of justifying this presumption, the obvious justification comes from the social contract theory that provides the basis of American political philosophy. The general idea is that legitimate political authority derives from the consent of the governed and voting is a means of ongoing consent to the ongoing political authority. To the degree that the United States denies citizens the right to vote, it undercuts its own legitimacy. Thus, the burden of proof rests on those who would restrict voting and not on those who favor the right. There are, of course, arguments that children should not have the right to vote, but these can be countered.
One general class of arguments focuses on the alleged defects of children. The reasoning is that because children are defective relative to adults, they should not have the right to vote. One alleged defect is epistemic in nature: children lack the knowledge and information needed to vote in an informed manner. The obvious reply to this is that adults are not denied the right to vote if they are ignorant and ill-informed, which is often the case. While citizens should be knowledgeable and vote in an informed manner, this is not the foundation for the right to vote—it is, once again, the need for the state to secure consent to have legitimacy.
Another alleged defect is a matter of character: children are supposed to be irrational, impulsive and unable to make good decisions. To use a silly example, that children might vote to make cake legally a vegetable. But this does not distinguish them from adult voters, who often vote in ways that are irrational, impulsive and not good decisions in both the practical and moral sense. Opponents of Trump tend to see Trump voters this way, while still supporting their right to vote. Trump’s proponents tend to see Democrats this way, although they usually do not propose stripping all Democrats of the right to vote. While voters should be ethical and rational in their voting, these are not necessary conditions for this right.
There is also the alleged defect that children would be easily swayed and duped by unscrupulous politicians. While it is true that children can be less discerning and more trusting than adults, American politics shows that adult voters are easily swayed and duped. After all, Trump voters claim that Democrats are duped by Democratic politicians and critics of Trump point to his relentless duplicity and lack of scruples. So, both sides will agree that voters are duped, they just disagree as to who the dupes are. As such, if effective critical thinking skills were required for the right to vote, many adults would need to be stripped of this right. And, as noted above, the right to vote is not based on the ability to vote well, but the moral view that the legitimacy of the state depends on ongoing consent.
While this is but a single example, Mike Lindell provided an excellent example showing how a child, in this case Knowa De Brasco, can be rational and informed and an adult (who gets to vote and gets on the news as a pundit) can be ill informed, impulsive and irrational. While De Brasco and Lindell are both somewhat unusual, they do stand in for significant numbers of people: informed children and irrational adults. As such, the argument that children are defective relative to adults and should not have the right to vote is not a compelling argument—unless we wish to strip Mike Lindell and those like him of his voting rights. Which we should not do.
Another type of argument involves pointing out that rights and privileges are age gated in the United States. For example, the legal drinking age is 21. As another example, the legal age for marriage varies as four states have no official minimum age and other states range from 15 to 18. There are also age gates on driver’s licenses, being able to rent a car, and being able to enlist in the military. From a moral standpoint, the usual argument for restricting such rights (and liberties) is the sort presented by J.S. Mill in his discussion of liberty. Roughly put, children could be harmed by poor decisions if they had the freedom to make certain choices and they lack the faculties to reliably make good choices. This does raise an obvious problem for adults: if an inability to make good decisions should deny a person the right to make such decisions, then adults should never get the right to make such decisions. After all, if they made the wrong decision, they would have shown they should not have the right to make that decision. But, back to children.
While children use the same logic and critical thinking as adults, their brains are still developing and thus they are inclined to make what many adults would see as risky or bad choices. As such, it is reasonable to put age some gates in place—although there can be good faith and rational debate about what these should be. The justification is to protect children from harm until they are more capable of dealing with the consequences of bad decisions. Or have the agency to be accountable for such decisions. But this argument does not apply to the right to vote.
While a child might make a bad decision when casting their vote, the voting will not cause them the sort of direct harm that, for example, underage drinking or marriage could cause. The worst that can happen is what could happen to any adult voter: they will vote for someone or something that ends up causing them harm, such as voting for a politician who cuts education funding for the kid’s school or opposes gun control legislation that might reduce school shootings. As such, the protection from harm argument does not apply to voting, since voting does not cause direct harm to the voter.
One final argument I will consider is a practical one, that young kids who cannot read or work a voting machine on their own would not be able to vote. But this could be addressed by assisting children who want to vote (as adults are assisted) or by setting the voting age based on when kids would usually have the basic abilities needed to physically cast a vote; this would be at least by age 5, since that is when kids usually start school. And if they can handle going to school, they are ready to vote and would, generally, not do any worse than adults.