if you are legal enough to be allowed to work and it not considered child labor, and paying taxes on that income, then vote often!
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Hm, if I understand you right, you're saying that there's there's a sort of threshold of governance (eg you mention legally being allowed to work, and being required to pay taxes) that, once met, requires that those under such governance must have representation in the government. So, by that logic, would you then be okay with children not being allowed to vote if, say, they weren't allowed to work, and didn't have to pay taxes?
If a child is still legally the responsibility of its parents or guardians then the guardians would be responsible for making sure they vote in the best interests of the child. See also what’s happening in America (my country of residence) - a lot of fascists are voting in ways that will directly harm their lives. I could make an argument those decisions harm the children as well.
I feel like the line of questioning is a trying to head down a reductio ad absurdum path..
Should child actors be allowed to vote?
are they legally responsible for managing income? or are they emancipated?
So only legally emancipated children that also have jobs should be allowed to vote? That is a small and unusual subset of children.
well it was asked. also no not “that also” it was “or”.
and it wasn’t “that have jobs” it was “and are responsible for their own finances.” A manager who manages a child actor is, provably also an adult.
this is about two things:
a person’s relationship to capital and wage; a person’s relationship to the source of a state’s income. (taxes)
if a state can take taxes it can provide suffrage.
Lots and lots of people- from tourists to 10 year old kids to illegal immigrants- pay taxes and do not receive suffrage. I don't know if you are actually arguing that everyone who pays taxes should be able to vote or just playing devils advocate.
I am 100%* arguing that if someone pays tax they should be allowed to vote. Unironically. Completely. Does this mean that if tourists need to be excluded, ok. One can do so by many means: citizenship requirements or even simpler, a process in which taxes are not charged to tourists similar to that duty free concept.
On the subject of illegal immigrants - Citizenship should be a 15 minute process, if we’re going to assume nations should exist at all. If nations “must” exist and therefore “must” tax, the moment an immigrant pays is the moment they become a citizen.
*: (you’re talking with an anarchist here; if nations must exist and must extract taxes… Then the replies hold to that mindset. I personally do not think they should exist. But they do [except israel]. So that’s the scope of these replies.)
A quiet benefit of lowering the voter age imo is that it allows families to vote together (physically not ideologically) while they still definitely share a home. This allows a culture of voting to grow which I think could really help voter turn out in the long term.
It could also lead to abusive situations where a child is restricted from certain freedoms or punished for voting for the wrong candidate. Children could be coerced into voting for whatever candidate their parents want. Maybe dad thinks the cons are gonna give him a big tax break but the kid thinks the NDP will bring rent prices down by the time they want to move out for college.
Votes are private
I can certainly understand your concern, and I think the definitive way to solve that is to have voting integrated into schools (which are often polling stations already)., but i think that doesn't make sense until voting age is lowered.
That said I think our system is already fairly resistant to coercion. If dad says vote CPC kids says "yes sir" and votes NDP and there is no possible way for dad to know the kid is lying.
I'll point out that there was a similar concern during suffrage and it turned out to be a non-issue.
The only ones that'll vote will probably be the children of religious nutjobs being used by their parents to stack the vote. None of the rest give a fuck about voting until they're 30 anyway.
If you are considered responsible enough to drive a murder machine, you should be able to vote.
The average 16 year old doesn’t have a high school diploma.
The average 16 year old hasn’t had a job these days.
These days? 16 year olds “these days” have jobs just like they did in “those days,” and having a high school diploma or a job shouldn’t have anything to do with a person’s ability to vote.
I’d also say there are more people over 16 who are far less qualified emotionally to vote than 16 year olds who want to vote.
If I had to change the voting age, I would personally be more inclined to raise it rather than lower it.
Totally agree.
I understand the logic, that Parliament is making decisions that is going to affect the future lives of our youth, but I would worry about young people who have grown up devouring a steady diet of TikTok, youtube and Instagram making voting decisions before they've really understood how much the messages they ingest have been massaged, curated and shaped in order to manipulate them. There's far too much rage baiting, shilling and astroturfing on socials but the hard fact is that the really effective stuff is getting harder to discern and AI and algorithms are making it harder and harder to figure out what's real and what's not.
At 16 I certainly would have voted like my parents because they had made me think the same way they did and any other way was wrong.
In hindsight, every choice they made was the wrong choice that brought in further conservative politics, austerity and the destruction of our social safety net.
This would benefit Conservatives (and the NDP to a lesser extent) and hurt the Liberals. https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/article/federal-election-vote-intention-split-among-age-gender-nanos/
Kind of ironic since the sponsor of the bill is from the Liberal party.
NDP actually.
I thought it was introduced by Nate Erskine Smith?
It says Bachrach.