The principles of elections should be very clear, and foremost among them should be, must be, this: One voter, one vote. Every vote counted, every vote having equal influence on the outcome, every vote valid. As we regularly point out here in these virtual pages, it's always the right that pushes for election integrity, including verified voter rolls, confirmation of citizenship for registration, and the requirement to identify oneself before casting a ballot. And, conversely, it's always the left that stands adamantly in the way of any sort of election integrity measure.
It's tempting to say that's because it makes it easier for the left to cheat. And that's very likely true.
The left is also continually coming up with schemes to dilute the one-voter, one (verified and valid) vote principle. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is one. But the left hasn't finished plumbing the deep, dark depths of stupid yet; now, out of Australia, comes a catastrophically stupid scheme to give the votes of younger voters more weight than those of their older counterparts. A piece in the Australian version of the Guardian, by one Bernard Keane, is proposing just this.
As someone nearing 60, I can confidently say my generation, and older generations, have been very good at tilting the policy playing field in our favour. Our political and economic system is very good at prioritising the views of older people. So maybe it’s time to tilt the electoral system back in the other direction, in favour of younger voters.
This could be accomplished in several ways. The one most often discussed is lowering the voting age to 16. Another is something called Demeny voting, in which parents or guardians could cast votes on behalf of their children. While this would seem to favour parents rather than young people per se, it should not be forgotten that many parents of under-18s are younger people themselves, despite the rising age of motherhood in Australia.
As someone well past 60, I can confidently say that this is one of the dumbest takes I've ever seen. We've seen the far left here in the United States, including some of the current crop of "democratic socialist" knuckleheads, shooting for the voting age of 16 notion, which makes the idea seem even dumber. We don't let these kids buy guns, or booze, or sign contracts; why in Jehoshaphat should we let them vote?
But Mr. Keane is about to hit the TURBO button on stupid:
My preferred method is to weight votes according to age: voters below, say, 30 would receive a more heavily weighted vote, voters 30 to 60 would get a less weighted vote, and those over 60 would retain their current single vote. For argument’s sake, you could multiply the vote of under-30s by 1.3 and that of 30- to 60-year-olds by 1.1. People’s ballot papers could be distinguished by colour – under-30s get blue, 30s to 60s green and oldies red – to make counting easier on election night.
How could such a blatantly discriminatory democratic system be justified? On the grounds of simple justice: policy decisions will affect younger voters for far longer than older voters, who will be alive for a much shorter period. The classic example is the climate crisis: younger voters will disproportionately bear the costs of climate change compared with older voters, who will die in the next 20 years and who are far less likely, seemingly, to care about it.
The left thinks they can justify anything, it seems, by sticking the word "justice" in there somewhere.
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Remember when you were 16? I can remember that age pretty well, despite my current state of superannuation. I was far from responsible. Even at 18, when I marched into the polling place for the first time and plunked in my votes for Ronald Reagan, a young guy running for the Senate named Chuck Grassley, and a bevy of local and state-level Republicans, I probably wasn't the most well-informed person standing in that line. Oh, I was already an info-junkie; out of all my friends, I was the only one I knew of who read our local newspaper when my parents were done with it, and I was the only one who would sit and watch the 6 o'clock news - sometimes.
Even so, I wasn't anywhere near as well-informed as my parents. There's no reason anyone should expect a 16-year-old to be as well-informed as their elders. And, we might remember, not all that long ago, the voting age in most states was 21. The 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, set that age at 18, and that's where it remains today.
What makes this scheme particularly egregious is that it is so transparently intended to give more political weight to the left. There's an old saying, often attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, that says, "If a man at age 20 is not a liberal, then he has no heart. If a man at age 40 is not a conservative, then he has no brain." It's apt; most people's views tend to moderate as they age. This proposal is a naked plan to take advantage of that, of youthful inattention, of the fact that younger people are 1) generally not well-informed, and 2) more emotional and less logical.
Schemes like this aren't about justice. Ranked-choice voting wasn't, either. It's not about one voter, one vote. It's about rigging the system to favor the left. Every such proposal you see is designed to rig the system to favor the left. Oh, the left will make the same case about voter ID and so on, but anyone with enough brains to pound sand can see that making identification a requirement for voting affects every voter equally. But things like this?
This is one of the most pathetically obvious proposals for election-rigging I've ever seen, and I've been paying attention to these matters since the Carter administration. Way to go, Australia; you've got a real winner (that's sarcasm) in this guy.
