Last semester, I was assigned a This I Believe essay. This I Believe essays are short essays people write on their beliefs (duh) that are read on Sundays on National Public Radio. I submitted my essay to be reviewed for reading, but alas, it got rejected. Apparently they get a lot of essays about youth rights and don’t want any repeats ;). Since NPR dissed my essay, I figured I’d post it here.

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John Stossel did an interesting story on Friday’s 20/20 about voting. He asked whether uninformed voters shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Watch a portion of the segment here.

The piece unfortunately focuses on young voters, but certainly the message holds true for voters of any age who are, by and large, uninformed on the issues. While Stossel unfortunately didn’t phrase it this way, the question NYRA asks is why do we let these uninformed people vote when informed individuals under 18 aren’t allowed to vote at all?The segment has attracted a bit of backlash from the group, Head Count, shown in the piece (they’ve done an effective job of spreading that backlash around to other sites too). They made some great arguments:

All Americans - young and old - may not be experts on the every issue, but they are experts on their own lives.

Democracy is for all of us, not just a select few. As a nation, we eliminated the idea of literacy tests decades ago, and rightly so.

Of course those arguments, and many others they made, apply to individuals under 18 just as well as those 18-30.

So basically we have two sides representing two classic arguments about voting. One, represented by Stossel, says that voters should be educated and informed in order to vote. The other says that even the uneducated have a stake in the system and deserve to represent themselves.

Neither argument precludes lowering the voting age. So I wonder whether John Stossel or HeadCount would support lowering the voting age below 18. I wonder whether either side will apply their arguments consistently and without an ageist bias. I will contact them both.

While NYRA isn’t in the business of generational warfare, we have seen our share of artillery barrages from older generational warriors.  So now and then it doesn’t hurt to peak out from our trenches and fire back.  A fascinating new study gives us some nice ammo:

Political science professors Richard R. Lau of Rutgers University and David P. Redlawsk of the University of Iowa say voters in their mid-to-late 60s start to lose their grip on evaluating political candidates. In simulated presidential campaigns, Lau and Redlawsk found that older voters both seek out and recall less information about candidates. As a result, seniors have overall lower rates of what Lau and Redlawsk call “correct voting” — a measure they developed to test how well voters select the candidates who share their positions and ideologies.

More details:

The age effects start showing up in the mid-to-late 60s. As people age, two things are happening. One is that they have a harder time processing new information, so they are learning less quickly than they used to. But as people age, they also have more overall knowledge to draw on. This means they have more established intuitive shortcuts, which means they actually need less information to make a good decision because they better know what information to look for in the first place.

For the first 50 years of one’s voting-age life, then, these two forces tend to balance each other out. But increasing reserves of experience can compensate for declining mental sharpness only until about the mid-to-late 60s. After that, the decline picks up steam. By the time voters turn 90, the scholars’ models predict their correct level of voting will be roughly half of what it was when they were 20.

Quite interesting indeed.  Yet would anyone remotely suggest to set a maximum voting age?  Not bloody likely.  Since voting competence exists on a continuum with lower competencies at either end, why does one end get the vote and the other end is completely disenfranchised?