Vivek Ramaswamy proposes raising voting age to 25

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The Hill

That's a good point, why should you want people voting when their rational brains are not fully developed and they can not make complete judgements?

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclop ... entID=3051

I do support this tbh, but at the same time, if we are using mental maturity as a marker.....

I know people whose brains will never "fully develop", regardless of how old they get. And they can vote. And I think they should be able to, because they live here too and deserve to have a say in how the nation they live in is run and vote on policies that affect them.

Maybe we should set a maximum voting age of 65. That would disenfranchise the vast majority of the Fox Noise viewers. And, politicians would feel free to cut Medicare and Social Security.

Just typical conservative attempts at reducing the voter pool. They're anti-democracy.

Well...

this old fashioned idea that we voters should choose our leaders is obviously out dated.

And its time that we reverse the idea, and let the politicians choose their voters!

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But seriously. The GOP tries gerrymandering to the suppress the Black vote, and now they are going for suppressing the young vote. Both groups that tend to vote Democrat.

They have nothing to offer to win over even old White male voters except for culture war scapegoating of immigrants, Trans, and "Wokes". So what else can the GOP do but suppress the other party's votes?

"If you vote for me, I promise to take away your vote!"

...yeah...that'll work... ¬_¬

"You're old enough to kill, but not enough for votin'"
- P. F. Sloan, Eve of Destruction

Seems Vivek's way around this logic is to say you're old enough to vote if you kill for the government. No suffrage for pacifists or people too disabled or chronically ill for the military/emergency services/general employment until they hit 25 I guess.

And the nonsense about the brain not being fully developed until you're 25? Do we really want to set the precedent of reserving voting rights for people with brains that are "developed" enough? Do we take away the vote from people with Down Syndrome? Schizophrenia? FAS? Do we take away the vote from people who suffer severe brain damage?

I hope I don't need to explain on an autistic forum why it is wrong to gatekeep suffrage behind arbitrary standards of "brain development"--standards which would invariably be set by The Neurotypicals.

roronoa79 makes a needed point here. The voting age in the U.S. used to be 21, but the draft age was 18. That's the reason for young people back in the era of the Vietnam war arguing that, if you're old enough to kill, you ought to be able to vote. Not because you should kill first, but because people who are old enough to be sent should have a say in the governance that sends them. That doesn't exclude pacifists. It's just making the point that a person considered too young to vote shouldn't be considered old enough to go to war, so if you think someone should be able to train and go into combat, why would you consider that person too immature to vote? Why would you lay killing on someone you think is not a full adult? So, if we decide to change the voting age to something older, maybe the age at which one can join the military should be raised by just as much.

Likewise the point about not banning people over cognitive development. Besides, what would this mean if someone had a brain injury - especially if it came from combat? Would that remove a veteran's right to vote? I think a lot of people would take issue with that.

I am sure that there are some young folks who are willing to vote away their own ...right to vote.

But more common are folks who are eager to vote away... their neighbor's right to vote...so that their own vote is worth more.

Perhaps this is my young, underdeveloped brain talking. However, if you're at an age where you're allowed to:

- have a job and be taxed

-rent property and live independently

- drive a car

- get married

- have children and raise them without public outcry or concern based on age

- die for your country

Then voting shouldn't be out of the question. It's amusing really. 'Let's ban the youth from voting because they're not voting for who I want them to vote for!'

I say we should raise the voting IQ to 100...

I think he's mostly talking rubbish. His strongest point is in (vaguely) alluding to restricting voting rights to people capable of understanding the political issues, but even that is dodgy. He's already got a heavily partisan idea of the kind of people he wants to be allowed to vote. He seems to think their degree of national pride should have something to do with it, but he doesn't explain why, or even what he thinks "national pride" is. If you're not in some ways ashamed of your country, then presumably you're content to let things go on as they are, and don't particularly need to vote. I suspect that by national pride he means conservatism.

I think the problem with restricting voting rights to those deemed to be capable of voting responsibly is that there's no consensus on the required qualities. I've sometimes wondered if tabloid newspaper readers might be excluded on the grounds that anybody stupid enough to swallow that crap doesn't deserve a say in the running of a country, but I'd be loathe to implement it even if I could. It's too elitist, too close to a dictatorship, and I think it's probably better, if rather unsatisfactory, to let everybody vote regardless of how stupid they seem to be. Otherwise somebody up there gets to decide who's rightly eligible and who isn't, and I don't trust the kind of people who would decide that to do so without any whiff of political bias.

Anyway, I predict that he'll never get away with it.

If anything things should go the other way.

My view is that if you're capable of filling in a ballot on your own, or expressing a personal preference, you should be allowed to vote.