German government wants to let 16-year-olds vote – DW – 06/05/2023
German government wants to let 16-year-olds vote – DW – 06/05/2023
Germany's center-left government wants to lower the voting age for nationwide elections from 18 to 16. Many young people support the idea, but the majority of the population has expressed skepticism.
What do you think? Personally I'm all for it. I think it's important to have as many young people involved in politics to counteract the old majority.
It´s important to keep in mind that they don´t want this out of the goodness of their hearts but because young people are their target demographic.
When i was around 16 i would´ve considered this the best idea ever tho.
It being their target demographic is tangential, not the point.
You gain other rights and obligations before the law when you turn 16. When the law recognizes your decision-making capability, why would it not allow you to vote?
Youth has become more mature earlier. Many 16-year-olds are interested and engaged, some take initiative and are politically or socially active. Denying them the right to vote is questionable when there's no clear arguments to do so.
I’m long past 16 and not German, but I fully support this idea.
Would like to see a cap placed on the age of voting as well.
The so called Letztwählerprinzip.
i used to think it was a bad idea, because i know how much learning and growing up 16 years old still need to do. then i grew older and realized how many adults by age never did that.
Also the target semographic argument only works mildly for the green party. The social democrats are as much of a retiree party as the conservatives ans the liberal party only advertises to young people on tiktok and instagram, but their target audience is 30+ multimillionaires driving Porsches
i used to think it was a bad idea, because i know how much learning and growing up 16 years old still need to do. then i grew older and realized how many adults by age never did that.
Exactly. If I'm being honest I probably was a more informed (though not necessarily wiser) voter at 17 than I'm now. Of course we can argue that on average it goes the other way and being a new junkie at 17 like I was is most definitely not the norm, but if we let such statistics rule, we'd have to re-think the whole voting system. E.g. in Germany the school system provides a wonderful and easy solution to let only "Bildungsbürger" vote. Or we can argue with the fact that girls and women tend to score worse on tests regarding general knowledge (including the politics category), the male affinity for radical solutions, the fact that the human brain starts decaying it's 30s and so on. But in the end these statistics only give information about groups, not individuals. So I don't feel comfortable with using them as long as there's any significant number of people in that group who are able to make a conscious decision about their vote. That isn't the case with newborns, but it very much is the case with teenagers.
Tl;dr: Give me an attribute and I'll find you a statistic that you can use to explain why people with that attribute should be excluded from voting.
I think it's fine in theory. However, like the other commenter mentioned, it might not be with the best intentions. Young voters, like older voters, tend to be easier to manipulate.
In Austria it‘s already been a thing for a long time and… I can see where you are coming from. I mean my first vote at 16 was for the far right solely based on what my mother told me of the world. Still ashamed of that. Took me until 21 though to get out of that, so 18 would‘ve been no different.
That is why to me 16 is fine, a lot of young people are concerned about climate change for example which old people give less of a fuck about, just feels off to me to not let them express that in a vote.
Is that actually the case? What do you base that on?
I can see it for younger than 16. But I'm skeptical 16 is much different from 18 or 21. Maybe no different from even older.
It's solely dependent on the person and their experiences. I know I personally aged a lot from 16 to 18, but some people mature a little faster, some a little slower. Some not at all.
I think 18 is a decent starting cap, but for some people 16 is their 18, and for some it's their 14 or even 13. So it's hard to say.
The manipulation comment is based on my own experiences with teens I've known, so it's subject to bias.
Young voters may to manipulate by others but they are also less set in their ways. I'd say that older people are being manipulated by their past selves. After all that would explain a lot of irrationality regarding necessary changes to deal with climate change and other issues that won't go away.
To be clear, a two-thirds majority would be needed. There is no consense for this, so the governing coalition can wish whatever they want. Especially the CDU (and CSU) does not want this change, because most of the young people do not want to vote vor right-wing conservarives (in U.S. you would call it simply conservative) and thus the CDU would lose percentages. But at least the CDU vor AFD is needed and both will not agree.
But doesn't polling and alternative votes actually find that CDU polls reasonably well with the under-18s? Not at the same degree as their grandparents, but it's not a stark difference either.
Neat! IIRC the Zapatistas do it as young as twelve, and tbh I've never been convinced by the arguments against letting basically anyone who can understand the concept vote.
Coming from Austria where the voting age is 16 I have to say I'm surprised to find out it isn't the same in Germany.
It actually is on many state and city levels. Which kinda makes it hard to argue that voting on a federal level requires more maturity...
good thing.. go ahead.
The idea of myself at 16 voting terrifies me. I was basically a communist back then. I think you should let younger people (under 20) vote, ONLY if they have jobs and pay taxes. If they don't pay tax and are still living with mommy and daddy, they don't know what the real world is like.
I think this will be a huge win, only for virtue signalling politics, current trend or reactionary politics,, or ideas pushed by teachers.
There's not a lot of good arguments against lowering the voter age limit if you try to debate this policy in a way that is agnostic of which parties one thinks will benefit.
Same but reverse about the other election reform from this government - if it wasn't for CSU and the Left being the biggest losers of that reform, I don't think many would agree that it's democratic to just toss out the votes of one election (direct mandate) based on the outcome of a separate election (proportional vote).
In short: When you are party-agnostic: 16+ vote is okay, the hasty patch for the parliament size is not.
I think the main argument is that 16 y.o. are old enought to work and pay taxes and social contributions. So they should be able to vote. Also The voting age is 16 in many states. The maturity argument is really hard, as it depends so much on the individual. I think 16 year olds generelly possess the same mental capacity to understand party policies and have enough knowledge of how the government system works to be able to vote.
In fact, I find any argument that relies on the "maturity" or "capacity" of the voter extremely suspicious. There are people even today that genuinely believe that franchise must be restricted by means of literacy/mental capacity tests (transparent attempts to disenfranchise political opponents, be it conservatives fearing a more progressive youth or progressives fearing a more conservative older population).
The argument of relevance/degree of exposure to political decisions is indeed much better, than even going doing the maturity rabbit hole and trying to argue for a lower voter age that way.
Throwing out all of the direct mandate votes would be democratic again, though.
It's definitely a better option than the current reform.
Teenagers are idiots. Raise the voting age to 21.
At this point in time we also could get ChatGPT manage this land… I don’t think it would make a difference to lower the age. The „babyboomer“ are way more active in the voting than the younger generation :s So yes pleas lower the age to vote, also we need a maximum age for the Parlament!
Ah yes, let a language model decide politics, and ignore a few percent of potential voting power. I'd laugh if I didn't suspect you were serious.
The first part isn't serious you're right. The rest of it is. I don't thing it would make a big different to lower the voting age in the outcome. And i don't think it is a good idea, i remember my first voting i had no idea what to vote so i have vote "the lesser worst option" that i know to that time. It has to change more than the voting age in this system to work properly again...
I could hypothetically imagine a world where an AI could run a country, but we are a long way from that point with the existing systems that we call "AIs". They are optimized to produce responses that look human-like, but their model of the world is different from a human's, and pretty limited.
But even aside from that, the point of voting is to keep the interests of the leader more-or-less in line with that of the public. You're probably going to need some kind of mechanism like that. Specifically with AI, understanding how to align future increasingly-capable goal-directed AIs and human interests is a major issue; it may not even be a problem that can be solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence