Voting age reduction is not liberation

[DANAT4T]

I have no idea how reducing the voting age to 16 will lead to liberation. Society will not be better off just because 16 is seen as the right age anymore than those who said that 18 is correct. What about people younger than the 'appropriate' age. Political scientists have said that a younger age would not have changed the Brexit result. There has also been an outrage about 'young' men supposedly voting for Trump.
I hope more people will join me it calling out this particular 'liberation' scam.
Thank you

[Not Forever]

I believe that voting, in and of itself, should be a right, and honestly I don’t like the idea of something being tied to age. I’m skeptical of the notion that we would live in a better or worse society by denying or allowing the vote to certain categories of people. I know people who want young people to vote because they think they would vote left-wing; I know people who want to prevent older people from voting because they would vote right-wing or in favor of a welfare state that would ruin the nation, and so on… but to me these are pious illusions, since the voting tendencies of such groups can change from generation to generation. First and foremost, we are individuals; our age is a secondary characteristic.

If it were up to me, voting should be linked to paying taxes. Do you pay taxes in a given country? It doesn’t matter whether you were born there, it doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant, etc.—you pay taxes, you pay for healthcare, you pay for education, you pay for the state, so you have the right to decide what happens to your money. So for me, the right to vote should be linked to work.

And in any case, this wouldn’t change anything in society; I simply like the logical reasoning behind it. And to me, within the concept of liberation, it could make sense to start untangling things from age.

[CantChainTheSpirit]

Representational democracy is meant to mean that the people in power represent all people within a society, including children and the elderly.
This only works if all people in society have a say in who is representing them. Arguably this is more important for young people since it's young people who inherit the results of today's policies. Why shouldn't a child have a voice? The argument that they don't understand the policies clear enough doesn't make sense since most adults don't either. Seriously, people are asked to make a choice on which party has the best economic policies when even economists can't agree? Or which party has the best military policies when most of what happens in the military is classified? You might as well ask people to decide on what the next incision should be for a surgeon performing brain surgery.

But we carry out this performance every 4 years. A group of ill-informed politicians peddle policies they think illiterate voters will like the sound of and give them another 4 years of ego stroking. The result is boom and bust economies, ever increasing levels of tax and ever more fractured societies all arguing whether their idiotic leader is better than the next persons idiotic leader.

I'm a parent and actually the sharpest political comments I hear usually come from my kids. I'm highly educated and work with highly educated people but when it comes to politics, honestly kids usually ask the sharpest questions and make the most clear and insightful statements. I don't see a valid reason for denying children any say in how they are governed. I think the reason they are not given any say is purely because they would see the nonsense spouted by politicians more clearly and hold them more accountable. A politician can say that coal and oil is good for the environment and I guarantee adult loyalists will be nodding in agreement at something obviously bs, but a young person would see it as nonsense and call it out.

And I disagree that Brexit would have been the same if 16 year olds could vote. There's no way to say that is the case. Most young people I know were anti-brexit but regardless, if 16 year olds were invited to vote then they would be invited to debate and discuss and debating societies and student groups were discussing both sides in the run-up to the vote so there would be informed people talking about both sides, discussing with older people and that would have an impact, whether it would swing left or right.