The only reasonable argument for retaining the voting age

18 is arbitrary and unjustified. So is 16.

Nov 22, 2022

Hello and welcome to the second edition of Museum Street.

I’ve got a piece in The Guardian today focused on the voting age debate, which sprung back into life this week after the Supreme Court found in favour of the Make It 16 campaign.

I won’t self-plagiarise by repeating too much of my argument, but essentially it is one I am borrowing from Cambridge's David Runciman anyway: That the reasons people give for insisting on the voting age being 18 rely on a conception of voting we left behind a century ago.

Back then various democracies had tests they used to restrict the vote from those seen as either too dumb or too poor to deserve it, something which in many cases was a proxy for race. It was seen as natural that someone who couldn’t read shouldn’t be able to vote, or who didn’t own any property.

We have mostly abandoned these notions, as you can see when you apply any argument against a teenager voting onto someone who is 100.

Let’s start with cognitive ability. A 100-year-old has a roughly 41% chance of having dementia but we have sensibly decided that removing the vote from them automatically or undertaking some kind of cognitive test for them would be barbaric. We similarly don’t insist that they have read enough newspaper articles - they are a human being who exists in society, and that gives them an iron-clad right to have a say in how that society is run.

You can also apply this to the idea - as David Seymour put it in his argument against lowering the age - that young people don’t pay any tax but want more spending. Most 100-year-olds only pay tax on their superannuation and will likely cost the government a fair bit in health costs. But again, it would be horrific to decide this means they don’t have the right to vote. (Also, teenagers pay GST - and plenty pay income tax.)

There is the wider argument about participation in society, with children not quite having the stake that an adult does. But someone who is 17 at the 2023 election will spend two years of that coming political term in what we all seem to agree is the 18+ adult world. And of course, they have the rest of their life to live with the consequences.

Another argument concerns a comparison between the criminal age of responsibility and the right to vote. The Children’s Commissioner presented some interesting evidence on this, essentially arguing a difference between the slow and considered kind of rationality that lets you choose what university to go to and the fast and reactive kind of rationality that might stop you from making an extremely dumb decision on a night out:

“…when situations call for deliberation in the absence of high levels of emotion (cold cognition), such as voting, granting consent for research participation, and making autonomous medical decisions, the ability of an individual to reason and consider alternative courses of action reaches adult levels during the mid-teen years. When situations that involve emotionally-charged situations where time for deliberation and self-restraint is unlikely or difficult (hot cognition), such as driving, consuming alcohol, and criminal behaviour, impulse choices are more likely and mental processes are slower to develop, reaching adult levels into adulthood.”

I don’t have the scientific background to make a conclusive ruling on this, but a majority of the Supreme Court felt they did.

So what remains as the only reasonable argument?

Basically that any line is arbitrary - 16 as much as 18. 18 has been in place for close to fifty years without too much opposition and the overwhelming will of the (18+) public seems for it to be to stay that way. We shouldn’t look to change these tenets of our voting process without a much more concerted and democratic push for change - like the one that eventually won MMP in the early 1990s.

As Justice Kós argued in his dissent, expanding the franchise is inherently political - and thus the domain of Parliament. New Zealand has been (mostly) blessed with a bipartisan record of electoral law, ever since the landmark Electoral Act 1956. That act, hammered out by Labour and National, stopped constant tinkering with the length of the Parliamentary term and established the “reserved” provisions - basically parts of electoral law that can only be changed by a 75% majority in Parliament or a referendum, not the simple majority (50%) needed for all other changes. (I highly recommend Elizabeth McLeay’s book on this law.)

Kós argues that these reserved provisions should properly be seen as protecting not just 18-year-olds from losing the right to vote, but from having that right diluted by an expansion of the franchise.

The reserved provisions did not merely protect against diminution of voter qualification — for example, by increasing the qualifying age or, in the example given by the majority, re-inserting a property qualification. They also protected qualified voters against enlargement of voter qualification. Altering voter age is not a neutral political action. Whichever direction it goes in is likely to benefit some parties disproportionately. That consequence is perfectly fine, but it is one of the reasons voting age is reserved and requires a parliamentary super-majority

Which brings us back to Parliament, where this proposed change appears dead on arrival, as National are dead-set against it - and control 27.5% of the seats, making a 75% super majority impossible.

We should look at the history of other enfranchisements in an attempt to understand possible new ones.

So would they really change elections?

Kós argues that this change would likely benefit some parties disproportionately.

This is possibly true in the short term, but I’m not so sure in the long term. As Runciman again argues the history of new enfranchisement is one where predicted electoral effects rarely play out in full - instead existing parties shape their messages and policies to be more attractive to the newly enfranchised. Instead of just rolling over and saying “oh well women will never vote for us” you create a political program that appeals to women.

But let’s assume there is a partisan swing in a potential first 16+ election 2026 - what would it be worth?

Statistics NZ thinks there will be about 140,000 16 and 17-year-olds in 2026, part of a wider population of 5,264,000, with 4,120,000 being 18 or over. Let’s assume the overall ratio of 18+ voters remains the same as it did in 2020 - a year when 77% of the estimated eligible population voted, bringing us 3,172,000 voters of 18 or over.

If we assume that those 140,000 16 and 17-year-olds vote at the same rate at those aged 18-24 did in 2020 (60.9%) then we get 85,260 voters. (We should be careful here however, as turnout was exceptionally high for young people in 2020, it was just 50.1% in 2017.)

That brings us around 3,257,260 total votes with the 16 and 17s making up 2.62% of the vote. Now that is a serious amount of vote. If all given to one party that is otherwise able to enter Parliament it would mean three seats - enough to swing an election, and definitely enough to swing the cannabis referendum, if it all went one way.

But it wouldn’t all go one way. It may lean one way disproportionately for a while, but The electoral incentives it would create would mean various parties of the right would broaden their appeal to young people, or at least try to. As with all other voters, age would be a somewhat reliable predictor of preference, but not a perfect one - there are plenty of young people who support the right, after all. ACT and National are big on the national debt being a huge problem that young people should not be left to deal with - perhaps they would be able to convince the youngest voters to share this concern.