Vivek Ramaswamy proposes raising voting age to 25
ASPartOfMe
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“The United States faces a 25% recruitment deficit in the military and just 16% of Gen Z say they’re proud to be American,” Ramaswamy said in a statement. “The absence of national pride is a serious threat to our Republic’s survival.”
“At a time when young Americans are taught to celebrate their differences, Civic Duty Voting — and in particular the service path — creates a sense of shared purpose and experience,” he added.
The conservative entrepreneur notes on his campaign website that while the Constitution prohibits discrimination based on race and gender, it does not “expressly guarantee universal voting.”
“This is intentional: we live in a Constitutional republic, not a direct democracy,” according to the site, which adds, “Voting is a privilege, and civic duty is a proper precondition for enjoying that privilege.”
The proposal would require a constitutional amendment, which Ramaswamy acknowledged represents a “high hurdle.” He also recognized that “not everyone will like this proposal.”
“It will take persuasion to convince many of its merits, but I’m ready to take that on,” he said on Twitter.
Republicans have increasingly struggled with younger voters, particularly on issues such as the environment and gun violence.
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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
The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so.
In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part.
In teens' brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not always at the same rate. That’s why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.
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You should want them because they are even easier to manipulate than the grey hairs like me are.
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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.
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Just typical conservative attempts at reducing the voter pool. They're anti-democracy.
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Actually, older voters tend to be more moderate in their views, while younger ones tend to lean toward populist views.
It should also be noted that the 18-25 group has the lowest voter turnout of any age group.
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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!
============
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?
"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.
...yeah...that'll work... ¬_¬
You'd be amazed at the number of conservatives under 25 who support these exact policies. Hell, there are conservatives who don't own property who advocate for a return to limiting suffrage to property-owners. How very objective of them.
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- Thucydides
MindWithoutWalls
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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.
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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!'
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old_comedywriter
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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.
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