Canadian legal blogger Leonid Sirota has posted an interesting response to my post advocating extension of the franchise to politically knowledgeable children. He argues that it is unjust to require children to pass a knowledge test for voting, but not adults. He would therefore prefer to lower the voting age to 16 instead: Pour ma […]
Archive | Voting Rights for Children
Education and Voting Rights for Knowledgeable Children
By Ilya Somin on November 7, 2012 1:03 pm in Democracy, Education, Political Ignorance, Voting Rights for Children
In response to my post arguing that we should grant voting rights to politically knowledgeable children, Paul Horwitz of Prawfsblawg makes the following suggestion: What spurred this post is Ilya Somin’s argument on the VC yesterday that knowledgeable children ought to be allowed to vote. He addresses some standard objections in his post, but a […]
Suffer the Little Children to Vote
By Ilya Somin on November 6, 2012 11:05 am in Democracy, Election Law, Political Ignorance, Voting Rights for Children
On this election day, as on most others, we will hear a lot about the need to increase turnout and the dangers of voter suppression. But few will even consider questioning the systematic exclusion of a huge part of our population from the franchise: children under the age of 18. We allow even the most […]