It´s important to keep in mind that they don´t want this out of the goodness of their hearts but because young people are their target demographic.
When i was around 16 i would´ve considered this the best idea ever tho.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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I’m long past 16 and not German, but I fully support this idea.
Would like to see a cap placed on the age of voting as well.
i used to think it was a bad idea, because i know how much learning and growing up 16 years old still need to do. then i grew older and realized how many adults by age never did that.
Also the target semographic argument only works mildly for the green party. The social democrats are as much of a retiree party as the conservatives ans the liberal party only advertises to young people on tiktok and instagram, but their target audience is 30+ multimillionaires driving Porsches
i used to think it was a bad idea, because i know how much learning and growing up 16 years old still need to do. then i grew older and realized how many adults by age never did that.
Exactly. If I'm being honest I probably was a more informed (though not necessarily wiser) voter at 17 than I'm now. Of course we can argue that on average it goes the other way and being a new junkie at 17 like I was is most definitely not the norm, but if we let such statistics rule, we'd have to re-think the whole voting system. E.g. in Germany the school system provides a wonderful and easy solution to let only "Bildungsbürger" vote. Or we can argue with the fact that girls and women tend to score worse on tests regarding general knowledge (including the politics category), the male affinity for radical solutions, the fact that the human brain starts decaying it's 30s and so on. But in the end these statistics only give information about groups, not individuals. So I don't feel comfortable with using them as long as there's any significant number of people in that group who are able to make a conscious decision about their vote. That isn't the case with newborns, but it very much is the case with teenagers.
Tl;dr: Give me an attribute and I'll find you a statistic that you can use to explain why people with that attribute should be excluded from voting.
It being their target demographic is tangential, not the point.
You gain other rights and obligations before the law when you turn 16. When the law recognizes your decision-making capability, why would it not allow you to vote?
Youth has become more mature earlier. Many 16-year-olds are interested and engaged, some take initiative and are politically or socially active. Denying them the right to vote is questionable when there's no clear arguments to do so.
The idea of myself at 16 voting terrifies me. I was basically a communist back then. I think you should let younger people (under 20) vote, ONLY if they have jobs and pay taxes. If they don't pay tax and are still living with mommy and daddy, they don't know what the real world is like.
I think this will be a huge win, only for virtue signalling politics, current trend or reactionary politics,, or ideas pushed by teachers.
Coming from Austria where the voting age is 16 I have to say I'm surprised to find out it isn't the same in Germany.
It actually is on many state and city levels. Which kinda makes it hard to argue that voting on a federal level requires more maturity...
I think it's fine in theory. However, like the other commenter mentioned, it might not be with the best intentions. Young voters, like older voters, tend to be easier to manipulate.
In Austria it‘s already been a thing for a long time and… I can see where you are coming from. I mean my first vote at 16 was for the far right solely based on what my mother told me of the world. Still ashamed of that. Took me until 21 though to get out of that, so 18 would‘ve been no different.
That is why to me 16 is fine, a lot of young people are concerned about climate change for example which old people give less of a fuck about, just feels off to me to not let them express that in a vote.
Is that actually the case? What do you base that on?
I can see it for younger than 16. But I'm skeptical 16 is much different from 18 or 21. Maybe no different from even older.
everybody is easy to manipulate without education
True, but it isn't solely that. I had a close family member that was a very educated chemist. Got corrupted by Fox News and eventually "red pill" communities.
he needs political education
To be clear, a two-thirds majority would be needed. There is no consense for this, so the governing coalition can wish whatever they want. Especially the CDU (and CSU) does not want this change, because most of the young people do not want to vote vor right-wing conservarives (in U.S. you would call it simply conservative) and thus the CDU would lose percentages. But at least the CDU vor AFD is needed and both will not agree.
unfortunatly the afd is very popular amongst young people. Especially young men in the east.
young man in this case is mostly the 25-35 age braket
Nope. I was referring to the results of the "under 18 elections", which is basically a survey of who minors would vote for on the election days.
Teenagers are idiots. Raise the voting age to 21.
At this point in time we also could get ChatGPT manage this land… I don’t think it would make a difference to lower the age. The „babyboomer“ are way more active in the voting than the younger generation :s So yes pleas lower the age to vote, also we need a maximum age for the Parlament!
Ah yes, let a language model decide politics, and ignore a few percent of potential voting power. I'd laugh if I didn't suspect you were serious.
The first part isn't serious you're right. The rest of it is. I don't thing it would make a big different to lower the voting age in the outcome. And i don't think it is a good idea, i remember my first voting i had no idea what to vote so i have vote "the lesser worst option" that i know to that time. It has to change more than the voting age in this system to work properly again...
My situation was the same as yours, but I think it would have been like that no matter what age. I'm not sure it's a good idea either, but fact is there are kids who're politically active and can't vote, and that seems a little silly. Democracy's whole thing is that it doesn't exclude.
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