There is a movement afoot in England to lower the voting age to 16. This I am all for. Everyone should have the right to participate in pointless exercises in "democracy" at any age whatsoever. However, I am apparently in the minority. I heard someone recently discuss how lowering the voting age would cause people to vote "inappropriately". Although I was unable to ask what, exactly, inappropriate voting could be, I still wondered at it, especially as, after the American election of 2000, my idea of inappropriate voting is not constrained by age but rather by proximity of relation to the Bush family.

Obviously, one of the assumptions here is that people who are under the age of 18 are too immature to vote. I would argue that this is not only false and prejudicial reasoning - made all the more offensive by the fact that it was someone approximately my own age who was making the argument. After all, if laws affect people under the voting age, then of course they should have a say in at least who is making the laws.

In fact, I would go so far as to argue that we need to change the definition of democracy to more of a meritocracy - you are only allowed to vote if you are able to make a sensible, informed decision based on more than party lines. This would undoubtedly remove a large group of older persons from the voting rolls, but would hopefully have the salubrious effect of actually having an intelligent group in charge of elections rather than the vast mass of humanity (myself included on more than one occasion, sadly) who merely vote against things, rather than for them.

And yes, there is an important distinction here.

Voting against something generally means that there is an option out there that you are not prepared to consider. Therefore, if you vote against it, it will not occur (usually). Voting for something means that you have considered the options and have arrived at the at least informed decision that the issue might be worth a shot.

Nowhere was this demonstrated so clearly to me as the election in Washington where the new Mariners stadium was an initiative on the ballot. I saw people there that I had never seen before in my life, and have not seen since. It was a huge voter turn out, one that soundly rejected the stadium initiative. Of course, we wound up with the stadium anyway, but that was because people didn't take the time to find out that one of the state senators is a great friend of business, but not so good about seeing the common people whose backs he's empire-building on.

But my point is that people didn't go in and consider the rationale for or against the stadium. They didn't consider that it might be a huge economic boom to the city. They didn't consider that the Mariners' owners were threatening to move the team out of town if we didn't give them a stadium. (And I voted against it too.) The vast majority did consider that the state was asking them for money. The thing was to be partly funded by - as I recall - a rise of .4% sales tax, .8% on certain services (restaurants, hotels, entertainment in general) and some kind of property tax for at least King County. They took one look at what appeared to be the government climbing into the peoples' pocketbooks again and said no.

Or there's the classic example of not even reading the ballot. Or of voting for someone only because you don't want the other person to be elected - based on the last American election, Adolf Hitler would get votes just because he wasn't a Democrat. Or of voting for someone because they've got a really deserving running mate, even though the main candidate is in fact scum. Or of voting for a party or person because you believe their campaign promises.

So how can we assume that 16 year olds will vote more irrationally than that?

After all, everyone sells their vote in a way. If you believe the ads that a candidate is able to run, that's no less selling your vote to that candidate as voting the way someone tells you to is. In fact, the only way that it differs is that in the latter case, you're stupid enough to vote the way a middleman wants you to.

The way I see it, it's basically a control issue. The electoral process is flawed in the US; the entire political system is an incomprehensible mishmash in Britain. Both are basically going to remain unchanged no matter who's "in charge". Government is quite effective at steamrollering right over people - it's big, it's unwieldy, and the people who get the screen time are frequently liars. So to control it, some people evidently think that we must control the people who have the right to vote, especially when it's a group as threatening as your basic teenager.

I don't see what the worry is. You're not going to control teenagers any more effectively than they are already controlled, and their vote is going to reflect the population at large - a certain percentage will vote with care, a certain percentage won't, and a certain percentage won't vote at all. So what's the problem?

However, beyond the idea of controlling the youth vote lies the idea that anyone's vote can and should be controlled. There are a couple of little points that are relevant here. The first one is that everyone has the right to vote any way they want. As long as the system is not changed to what I think it should be, where you have to demonstrate that you are capable of making an informed decision, then all are allowed to vote any way they would like.

The second is that controlling anyone's vote would be illegal. It would, in fact, be an abrogation of the rights that voting is supposed to uphold, namely participation in the extremely crippled democratic system that we in both America and Britain profess to believe in.

The third point is that controlling votes should not be the point. We should look at it as an opportunity to swing more votes behind the control of the government, in the hopes of getting some control over it. The government is supposed to respond to us, but, as I've often enough in this archive pointed out, it generally doesn't. Look at lowering the voting age as more numbers on our side and fewer on the side of the government, which tends to justify a lot of things by saying that it speaks for those who can't speak for themselves.

Basically I'm all for allowing more people to participate in this three-ring circus. I think that it's going to be the only way that we will actually get some control over the government that is supposed to respond to us and that we are supposed to be able to affect. And until there's a serious overhaul of the whole thing, there's no point in not allowing people to vote just because we're scared that they might think for themselves or might not think at all.

After all, that was the logic behind not letting women, minors, and people of color vote, despite Amendments 15, 19, and 26 - they wouldn't be able to vote correctly. Do you really want to return to those days?

Voting early and voting often,

Channon