Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
Everyone has the right to vote at X age. So they do all have the same rights. Why is "fully interacting with society" the point at which we give people the vote? Don't we want people to vote well, with good reasons?
No they don't, the wording itself contradicts you. The Constitutional amendment itself says that this is a right only to be protected to those above a certain age, hence those below the age do not have such right because it is not protected. It's like saying the right to free speech to anyone above 25. Are you really going to say that the 23 year old socialist protester who gets arrested for "improper ideas" still has the same rights as the 50 year old spouting the same thing who has a free pass, since all that young kid had to do was wait 2 before before opening his mouth against the government?

Fully interacting with society is the point we give people the vote because it is the point where they are given the opportunity to truly understand the effects of laws and bills and ideologies in terms of how it will effect themselves and everyone around them. A 14 year old has little understanding of the extent that government plays in his life. "Don't we want people to vote well, with good reasons?" Sure, but like I said that is subjective. What determines voting well? Being informed? Knowing broadly what party suits your ideology? Voting based on a single issue that you hold dear to your personality/ideology? There is no real answer to any of those questions unless you start getting into totalitarian territory.

I think this is beside the point. Counterexamples are not really relevant. Any standard voting age will be subject to that criticism, no? Sure not all 25 year olds have improved but most of them have.
Exactly, which is why I ask for the voting age to as low as possible without having become extremely absurd like having 5 year olds vote. It's for the most part very arbitrary. Again, you use terms like "most of them have improved" how so? How do you define improve? They switched their opinion once during this period? Their reasoning has become more defined? No ones reasoning is perfect and some people gain a greater understanding of the world without having their opinion change one bit. Using that argument you would have to say, well then lets give it to them at 30 then because they will have learned more then. No wait, 45 because they will be even more learned by then. No wait, lets just have the oldest person decide for us since he should have learned more then anyone else. The idea that more time=better results on an individual level is just completely flawed and cannot be used without having drastic logical consequences. That is unless you put some arbitrary limit where people beyond a certain age should be "knowledgeable" enough from their years to be able to vote, but we are back to my original statement which is that such an arbitrary limit is useless and should be suppressed as much as possible to allow as many people as possible without going over board.


It's simply that 200 years ago people rushed through the early years faster than they do today. That's a fairly standard idea. It may be that 25 is the equivalent of 21 back when it was first set at 21.
Well that maybe all true, but it doesn't have any bearing on what we should do in terms of letting people vote. Like I said, what society thinks doesn't matter. Society is full of people who are not competent enough to vote properly so why are these people deciding on who else should be able to vote?

Maybe the 65 year old votes that way because he started out at 18 voting because "x is cool", and the habit stuck?
Supposition. Perhaps they started watching the Fox News 5 years earlier and didn't have the common sense to have any skepticism when people on TV start telling them that a certain group of people are ruining the country.

But this doesn't disagree with me. We set the age limit at the point where most people are as rational and beneficial citizens as they are likely to become, right? Do you think that's when they are in high school? With the voting age at 18, aren't we saying to these people "that crappy us history and government class you slept through is all the preparation you need to vote"?
No, we set the limit where we think people should be able to have rights due to society having a high involvement in their lives already. We moved the limit from 21 to 18 because of the Vietnam War. 18 years olds were deemed sufficiently involved in society to be able to be drafted and thrown off into a war for the country, so the country decided that therefore they should have all the rights bestowed upon them within this society, including voting. Like I said, I think it is when they have become integrated into society to the point that laws, government and decisions begin to have a clear impact on their lives. We can measure this more objectively by the average or usual number of legal contracts on an individual such age bracket has in society. If we were to take a look at that we would probably see a huge spike on the number of contracts per person on average around 15 or 16 which is when kids usually start to drive and get jobs. Therefore, this seems to me to be the most logical point to have their voting rights bestowed upon them. We are not saying anything to them other then that you have this responsibility on your shoulders, this is the extent we will prepare you for this responsibility, the rest is all on your own personal responsibility.