Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Why can't younger people vote? I think this breaks into two separate questions: Why don't younger people vote very much and what can we do to encourage that. And, why do we stop 16 year olds from voting? Here is one Labour policy I'm very much in favour of: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-party-a...

Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? More generally, why do we have representative democracy at all? We have the internet. It's now technically possible for everyone to vote on every issue, or even to have everyone collaborate on drafting new laws.

View on HN

> We have the internet

About that... say some of us did set up a usable and scalable direct democracy mechanism on the Internet. Say we get the massive user-base this deserves for some currently existing nation. Imagine for some random piece of psuedolegislation, we got some law passed in said system such that it succeeds with an unprecedented turnout and majority lead. At what point does that stop being just a petition but the actual law. A near impossible feat, but when military turnout reaches a certain percentage, I think at some point we have something going.

More realistically, why not create the software and infrastructure and start pitching this to some cities, counties, maybe even states/provinces to start doing this? It could at least be informative and entertaining.

More practicalaly, the biggest issue I see is in the security of it. How could identity be handled? Integrity? etc, etc. #trust

I say, let's get started anyway. We'll probably want to have some failure under our belt anyway by the time there's a real demand (assuming I'm psychic ;)

I think my point is, it's up to us. We are the people.

Security depends on people's willingness to participate. Democracies have solved these issues with primitive means in the past. It certainly can be done, would be an interesting experiment to say the least.

People are working on this. See for instance Aktiv Demokrati in Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktiv_Demokrati

The basic idea is that each person has a vote, and all matters should be resolved by a public vote. Since not everybody may have time and resources to vote responsibly in every matter, the vote can be delegated to someone else. It is easy to imagine how every person could delegate his or her vote to different people in different matters.

Going down this road, sometime you have to consider the question of actual motions and matters to vote upon. Who drafts these? Well, it should be the people who suggests questions to vote upon, and the people who decides which questions are most important -- by voting on them.

Then, the people should discuss the matter. Each person can voice their opinion, but also vote on the opinions of others. After a good discussion, with many arguments back and forth, it is time to vote.

But, alas! The matter has already been resolved. The most popular arguments have surfaced to the top, with the corresponding caveats and so on. This discussion is the perfect basis for drafting whatever law or resolving whatever matter was under question.

Now, this all sounds very similar to Reddit, or Hacker News. Basically, this is how the political process would work. Note that not all of what I have discussed here is a part of Aktiv Demokrati or their system. It's more of a summary of my own thoughts on the matter.

I'm having trouble imagining how the delegation mechanism works unless it's just incredibly broad[1].

To wit, how do I delegate my 2024 vote on whether or not to allow unaglisivation[2] to be legal or not? Political issues are emergent phenomena, and that would seem to be a problem with such a delegation system. It seems like it might be better to just mandate voting, or tie it to some basket of broadly sought after government gated entitlements, such as driver's licenses, etc. so as to make it generally more inconvenient not to vote than to vote[3].

[1]Obviously "incredibly broad" is not going to be very broad in relation to the current US vote delegation system which is pretty much "delegate all of my decisions to X", but if you're talking about creating a brand new system harnessing the power of information systems that didn't exist in the late 1700s, there's not much reason to constrain yourself to comparisons with such an archaic system.

[2]This is a made up term

[3]Though in such a coercive voting system, I think you would have to randomize option placement and offer a "no opinion" option for every issue so as not to unduly skew the results by the people who really do not want to vote, or don't feel well enough informed on a particular issue.

[edit to add footnote [1] and for clarity]

Sorry for the late reply.

I'm not quite sure I get your point, but I think it stems from a misunderstanding about the delegation. In my mind, this is very fluctuating. Let's say all questions are divided among departments, similar to today. Now, perhaps I I have delegated my vote on all questions of agriculture (which obviously unaglisivation falls under) to you.

This means that you carry my vote, until I either remove my support from you henceforth, or I vote differently in a particular matter. So, I have simply delegated all matters of agriculture to you on auto-pilot, but I can change that whenever I want -- including during a vote (which in this system must take some time, perhaps on the order of weeks, or indeed indefinitely, until a matter is resolved).

The system is inspired a little bit by the great John Byrne story "The Trial of Reed Richards".

> And, why do we stop 16 year olds from voting? Here is one Labour policy I'm very much in favour of:

Meh. That's as naked politicking as if the Tories suggested double votes for land owners or higher rate tax payers.

Tell us [the audience] why allowing disenfranchised people to vote is the same as allowing some people to vote twice.

> Tell us

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.

16 year olds aren't exactly disenfranchised

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.

[1] http://www.ippr.org/press-releases/111/11175/young-voters-sh...

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?

> 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 ;-)!

/trollface.jpg

> 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.

I'm not the one who argued in favor of drawing a line, actually. I'm all in favor of letting 8-year-olds vote.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

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.

Disenfranchised means not allowed to vote. Your reply doesn't make any sense at all, unless you're using a different definition.

16 year olds aren't exactly disenfranchised

Of course they are. They don't have the vote, but are still subject to all laws and taxes in full.

Representative democracy is not a technical solution. It was not a hack to overcome the lack of real-time communications.

It was chosen in full knowledge of the downside of direct democracy, which is mob rule.

I don't understand how someone can watch the online witch hunts on, say, Reddit, and think "I wish that had the force of law."

Today's 16 year olds are by far not mature in thought enough to vote. Sorry no.

I paid income tax when I was 16. I should have been allowed to vote.

Conversely, you could say that half the adult population is not mature enough to vote. Or how about your logic applied to Women during the Women's Suffrage movement. They didn't work as much or were as educated back then. Maybe they shouldn't vote- oh wait, nevermind. They were disenfranchised.

What about African Americans in the 1700's? Again, on average less educated and "mature" as one might say due to being a disenfranchised population.

The funniest thing about your vote, is that in 2 years from 16, they somehow magically become mature enough...

Children are biologically not the same as adults, in ways that directly bear on decision-making. The more we learn about how the brain develops, the more clear this becomes.

The reverse is true of black people and adult women: the more learn about the brains of these adults, the less proof we find for any differences in potential brain function.

This is why we treat the decisions of children more lightly than we do the decision of adults. This is a good thing, societally; otherwise millions of children could routinely be imprisoned for assault and battery due to common schoolyard shenanigans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com