16 year olds aren't exactly disenfranchised, and to the extend they are, they're not more disenfranchised than higher rate tax payers who pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes that everybody benefits from, but are actually in a minority of voters.
For the record, my point is illustrating the arbitrariness of being "disenfranchised", not arguing for extra votes for the rich.
In the UK and US they are very exactly disenfranchised.
they're not more disenfranchised than higher rate tax payers who pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes
They are disenfranchised, and higher rate tax payers are not. Anyway, enough niggling over what words mean.
There is a actual problem here which is that old people are disproportionately overrepresented, and this is why for example none of the "we're all in it together" cuts are going to affect pensioners. How do we solve that specific problem? One way is to get more 18+ young people to vote. Another way would be to allow 16+ to vote and ensure that they are taken from school to the voting booth. It has been shown[1] that you're more likely to vote in elections if you vote the first time.
You're not niggling over what "disenfranchised" means, you're just declaring your definition to be canon.
> old people are disproportionately overrepresented
How? For each one "old person", there is "one vote". That is the same proportional representation that every other adult gets.
> Another way would be to allow 16+ to vote and ensure that they are taken from school to the voting booth
How very democratic of you. These youngsters are old enough to decide what to vote, but not old enough if they care enough to actually vote?
> How do we solve that specific problem?
The specific problem being that the democratic process gets a result you don't agree with, and so your suggested solution is to change the democratic system to one more likely to return a result you agree with? Your strong commitment to democratic principles is showing.
We have to agree on the standard definitions of words, otherwise conversation cannot take place.
Now, as life spans are getting longer, that means naturally that there will be more and more older people. It's simply fairer that we should try to increase the pool of younger people voting, and also increase the retirement age, in order to make sure we don't continue to have a huge pool of non-working old people block-voting for their own benefits.
Of course there are limits (you can't have 8 y.o. children voting) but that doesn't mean we don't work where possible to make the system fairer and get more people to vote (ie. more, and livelier and more direct democracy).
> It's simply fairer that we should try to increase the pool of younger people voting, and also increase the retirement age, in order to make sure we don't continue to have a huge pool of non-working old people block-voting for their own benefits.
I don't see the "fairness" issue here. What I do see is that you have clear policy preferences, judge a certain class of people would likely vote contrary to that preference, and therefore want to get more voters who you assume will be more likely to share your policy preferences rather than the policy preferences you attribute to "non-working old people".
IOW, rather than selling your ideas, you just want to stack the deck.
> Is there any way of changing the definition of voter eligibility without someone being able to accuse someone else of stacking the deck?
There's a difference between situations where an such an accusation is a potential accusation which may or may not reflect the actual motivation (which, yes, is true for pretty much any change in voter eligibility) and situations where the change in voter eligibility has the sole stated motivation of using a new voter group to offset the specific presumed policy preferences of an identified existing group (such as where the justification is "...in order to make sure we don't continue to have a huge pool of non-working old people block-voting for their own benefits"), in which case its not an "accusation", its the overtly proclaimed motivation for the change.
Yes, that's true. But then the reply is: if you don't want to give young people the vote, and if you're afraid of how young people would vote, why are you subjecting young people to your laws?
You subject millions of young people to an authoritarian (in fact, sometimes downright totalitarian) regime and disenfranchisement on a daily basis and nobody cares because it's part of the plan. But build one little settlement in Occupied Palestinian Territory, and suddenly, everyone loses their minds!
And frankly, no, I'm not going to apologize for that comparison, because at least people are out there pointing out that Palestinian Arabs deserve freedom, self-determination, and human rights. In fact, to be even more of a blatant asshole about it, the oppression of Western youth may be a lesser oppression than a serious military occupation, but there's a hell of a lot more of them. Shut up and multiply ;-)!
> But then the reply is: if you don't want to give young people the vote, and if you're afraid of how young people would vote, why are you subjecting young people to your laws?
That's not really a reply (except insofar as a non-sequitur is a "reply"), that's a completely different and unrelated argument for youth voting from the one offered previously about the desirability of offsetting a presumed voting preference of retirees.
And the response ot that is that you yourself have argued that a line must be drawn somewhere on how young people can vote, saying, "Of course there are limits (you can't have 8 y.o. children voting)",, and you haven't yet provided an argument for why the current line (18 years old) is the wrong place to draw the line, or proposed any criteria for deciding where to draw the line, just presented a lot of hyperventilating about "oppression" and a bizarre analogy to the military occupation of Palestine.
As such, you haven't yet presented even a coherent position to discuss.
In the large, 8 year olds will vote the way their parents want them to, and the demographics of the voting bloc you'd have just massively enhanced does not favor your particular political positions.
Oh, I apologise, I didn't realize you're royal.
> allowing disenfranchised people to vote
16 year olds aren't exactly disenfranchised, and to the extend they are, they're not more disenfranchised than higher rate tax payers who pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes that everybody benefits from, but are actually in a minority of voters.
For the record, my point is illustrating the arbitrariness of being "disenfranchised", not arguing for extra votes for the rich.