Imagine if half of adult women were not allowed to vote. Imagine if half of adult men were not allowed to vote. That would seem crazy. But that’s our actual democracy. Kids are almost a quarter of the US population and they can’t vote. JD Vance has made this issue oddly topical and it’s fun to write about because, surprisingly, we can do a lot of things to address it. I and others have written about the need for a more consolidated, non-partisan pro-child lobbying organization, i.e. an “AARP for parents.” But here let’s talk about how we can modify voting itself.
Before I dive in I want to confirm the obvious: voting really does matter, and not just in our hearts. When women, poor people, Black people, young people, and other groups have gained access to voting at different times and places in US history, government has shifted to serve their interests. The fact that kids have zero political voice helps to explain why we only pay for a K12 education system that covers 10% of childhood and leaves the remaining 90% up to individual parents. It explains why the public spends $2 per senior citizen for every $1 it spends on a child. It explains why we spend almost nothing on research to improve child development. Once it sinks in that kids have zero political power, a lot of things come into focus.
So what should we do about this?
Lower the voting age
First, we should lower the voting age to something like 16 or 14 or 12. Blogger Matthew Yglesias and the non-partisan organization Fairvote both make good short cases for this view. Yglesias emphasizes that young voters care about roughly the same things as other voters. They might shift political focus slightly away from immigration and toward housing affordability, for example, but they’re not aspiring anarchists or communists or libertarians.
When 16-year-olds vote in Austria, their voting behavior looks about as coherent as older voters. When American teenagers write about why they like or don’t like Donald Trump, they sound pretty much as savvy as adult voters interviewed in focus groups.
It’s not that teenagers are deeply informed about politics. It’s that no one is well-informed and that’s somewhat beside the point. Democracy works because enough people bring their lived experience to the polls. As voting adults we may not understand debates around inflation, immigration, or climate change. But we have a rough sense that our lives are getting better, or not. We have a rough sense that certain leaders respect “people like us,” or not. And we interact with the DMV, the post office, the police, the IRS. We rely on Social Security checks, Food Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid. So we also have a rough sense of whether government agencies on the ground are trying to serve our interests, or not.
Can teenagers bring these perceptions to the polls? Of course they can. Teenagers live in families trying to make a living. They go to public schools to learn from public teachers in public buildings. Maybe more empowered teenagers would have ideas about how to make school less tiring, stressful, and boring. The point is that they can share their slice of reality about as well as adults, and they should.
Think of it this way. Do you think our government would serve young people’s interests better if we raised the voting age from 18 to 25, so that almost no one starting their career or attending college had any political voice? If that sounds nutty, then why doesn’t the same intuition apply to 16 or 14 year-olds? Would you feel strongly we should take away their vote if they already had it?
A classic objection to kids voting is that they’re too influenced by their parents. There is some data on this. It suggests teenagers and parents have meaningfully different political views. Two different studies suggest about 20% of kids report being more liberal than their parents, and a little under 10% of kids report being more conservative than their parents. That is substantial, and may well belie larger differences in perspectives that aren’t captured by the liberal/conservative and Republican/Democrat distinctions in these surveys.1 Moreover, these numbers are not fixed. If kids could vote, political messaging would target them more directly, and kids may start to develop more independent perspectives.
Now, I do worry that enfranchising kids could politicize K12 schools, especially given the active partisan role of American teachers’ unions. Some teachers might try to sway kids in obnoxious ways. And teenagers are a fiery group. Imagine students staging MAGA parades during AP exams, or boycotting math class because their teachers’ union endorsed the “wrong” candidate for some public office.
But really, all adult workplaces already consist of people with voting rights, and they remain pretty apolitical places. Everyone knows that sharing inflammatory views on affirmative action or abortion makes it harder to do actual work. This should reassure us that schools would remain focused on teaching and learning. There’s a bit more risk here because public schools do have a lot of monopoly power, and companies with monopoly power are the ones most vulnerable to distracting kinds of political discourse. But this risk seems outweighed by the dangers of disenfranchising young people. Does anyone think we should prohibit workers from voting because it might distract them from their jobs?
What seems far more likely is that educators would simply help kids to vote. Schools might, for example, grant kids time off on election days, hold assemblies that celebrate the importance of voting, or sponsor events to make voting easy and fun. And doing this would have much larger impact than you might expect for a simple reason: voting is a habit. If kids start voting in school — and while they still live with their parents rather than by themselves or with equally young roommates — they will carry that habit with them into adulthood. Today, Americans in their 20s vote at around half the rate of older voters. Getting young people into the swing of voting before they leave high school could have big ripple effects far beyond the teenage years directly at play.
Give parents the vote
Even if we lower the voting age, we have to draw a line somewhere. Maybe it’s 14-year-olds. Maybe it’s 8-year-olds. For any kids deemed too young to vote, we should allocate their votes to parents. For two-parent families, each parent would get half of each child’s vote, a practice called “fractional voting.” Law professors Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen E. Sachs have written a great article that convinced me to take this approach much more seriously. I recommend you read it.
The first service these writers provide is to put the problem in context.
[T]he problem [of child disenfranchisement] is one of such screaming, urgent magnitude that the most important response to objections of detail is to ask: what would you do instead? Refusing to account for a quarter of the population’s interests is so great a democratic failure that the only justification for doing nothing is that nothing can be done. A country isn’t morally obligated to do the impossible. But in this case, there’s a solution. We should give parents the vote.
Doing this would raise a lot of persnickety questions about which adults get to vote on behalf of which kids. What happens with divorced parents ? Foster parents? Pregnant women? Kleinfeld and Sachs don’t ignore these kinds of questions. But they argue none of them rise anywhere near the level of intractability we would need to justify excluding a quarter of all citizens from voting. It’s hard to do a lot of important things.
Think of it this way. It’s also tricky to prohibit murder. What about insane people? What about people who go temporarily insane? What about self-defense? What about situations where someone feels threatened into a state of fear for many years and then snaps in a moment of panic that would not seem justified outside of this bigger, murkier picture? (I served on a jury that had to consider some of these issues and we all found them challenging.) These are important nuances, and they explain why laws around murder are complicated. But no one thinks we should give up and stop trying to prohibit murder. Excluding kids from democracy is grave problem and we should fix it unless doing so is very likely to pose equally grave risks. “This sounds complicated” is not an equally grave risk.
Kleinfeld and Sachs also argue that giving kids’ votes to parents would post surprisingly few legal obstacles. For me the biggest revelation here is that many states could probably do this on their own without even having to amend their constitutions, and their choices would apply to federal elections as well as state and local elections. There is no need for a national constitutional amendment or federal legislation. If true, then any state that wanted to stand out as “pro-kid” could try this out, and other states could follow over time if things went well. Thank you, federalism.
Finally, Kleinfeld and Sachs share some data on how parents’ and non-parents differ in their political positions. As with kids, the answer is reassuring: parents are probably just a bit more moderate. Giving parents the vote would not obviously favor one party over the other, or validate any of the fringe cultural movements in either party. It would probably shift both parties toward more concrete pro-child and pro-family policies.
So just because JD Vance revived the idea that parents should vote on behalf of kids in the form a mean-spirited rant, and just because Democrats have lampooned this idea to score political points, don’t dismiss it! It’s not crazy, and there is nothing mean-spirited about finding creative ways to get kids more political power.
If you know of any data on this please let me know!
"It explains why the public spends $2 per senior citizen for every $1 it spends on a child."
It might be closer to 3 to 1 when you count everything. And of course people actually get to choose how to spend their social security. I get government schools I don't like and no choice in the matter.
Giving parents the vote would give us school choice and a bigger CTC overnight.