You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.
It makes more sense to view voting rights as political capital that forces politicians to care about the needs of particular voting blocks then as a ticket to participate in some impartial decision process. The implication of this point of view is this: to get a more equal society, or at least to prevent certain extreme example of inequality, we need to make sure that as many people as possible have the right to vote.
The process of deciding who can and cannot vote is also fraught with moral hazard and the potential for corruption. A literacy test before voting sounds reasonable (if you believe we only want smart educated people voting) but it leads to corrupt situations like this:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...
This is a rare example of a real slippery slope: once you start the process of identifying small "undesirable" groups to disenfranchise, the process is unlikely to stop in anything short of full blown dictatorship.
This is absolutely not a voice in favor of the mentioned programs, just used as an example.
You don't know it yet but a lot of what you think you know stems from fake news too.
Holding the elders to the same rationale is fair if not just - the situation isn't just for anyone affected but they aren't getting special treatment. To give an absurd example executing people for jaywalking is unjust but doing it to all regardless of station is fair.
I believe in keeping voting sancrosanct mind you but I can see a rhetorical and logical point to it.
[0] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/voti...
However, the bit on education I still believe it to be true
"Hey, why is it that socialist ideas are so unpopular with adults who have life experience?"
If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.
Easily become a proxy for race/class? They already were used to disenfranchise people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting
> From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the United States administered literacy tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise racial minorities. Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century. Literacy tests, along with poll taxes, residency and property restrictions and extra-legal activities (violence, intimidation)[2] were all used to deny suffrage to African Americans.
There should be a registry of doctors who are creationists or believe other nonsense (I'll give the UFOs a pass depending on just how fervent their belief in them is; I mean, can you prove we haven't been visited? The evidence isn't very good but you can't prove a negative. If they believe they've been abducted, however, that's a whole different level. Of course, I also can't disprove their claim but I'd rather err on the side of caution and assume they have mental problems and find another doctor.).
I don't want a doctor giving me medical advice when they don't even believe in basic science.
>It all comes down to that better decisions are the decision I agree with, whoever the I in any given instance is.
Perhaps, but I think it should be obvious by now that people who decided to vote for Trump have had an extremely detrimental effect on the nation's economy and well-being.
People can be hugely educated and aware on some topics whilst being ignorant, blinkered and bigoted on others. You and me included. Plenty of highly educated people voted for the choice you didn't. Even in those recent "surprise" elections, be that Trump, Brexit or the more recent Brazilian election.
If you want to balance the ageing of society and the electorate, open up voting to the young by way of balance. Which may bring the added advantage of not yet being inculcated in the binary certainty of party tribes.
As I pointed out in another post here, I personally do NOT think the problem is age, despite the thrust of this article. As I said before, the alt-right is not full of geriatric people, it's full of men in their 20s-40s, mostly men with poor education.
As a man in that age group myself, I hate to say it, but I think the country would actually be better off if only women (of all ages), and men over the age of 60 could vote.