My preferred method is to weight votes according to age: voters below, say, 30 would receive a more heavily weighted vote, voters 30 to 60 would get a less weighted vote, and those over 60 would retain their current single vote. For argument’s sake, you could multiply the vote of under-30s by 1.3 and that of 30- to 60-year-olds by 1.1. People’s ballot papers could be distinguished by colour – under-30s get blue, 30s to 60s green and oldies red – to make counting easier on election night.
My preferred method of electoral discrimination is a neutral, consensus-driven basic competency test, with answers pre-published in an AEC pamphlet. If one can’t review a basic factsheet ahead of time and answer basic facts about the election, their vote surely isn’t adequately informed.
As for this article, age seems like an arbitrary factor to standardise. Why not the same with other relevant demographics? Out of all the problems our political system has, this surely isn’t the way to solve them.
I reckon the point the article makes has some merit. Plus, whether you agree with it a little, a lot, or not at all, it’s prodded us into discussing and thinking and learning from each other. I am so glad that people care about democracy. We need to keep the conversation alive.
One person one vote isn’t perfect but any attempt to tweak it gives power to some group to disadvantage another. We fought for this for too long. Universal suffrage is a corner stone of Australian democracy. Start carving out the aged and next will be indigenous, women, people who don’t own property and before you know it we are tipping our hats to the aristocracy. Fuck that. People need to engage their brains and read some books and stop jumping on board every distracting opportunity to kick our fellow Australians in the teeth to distract us from the real problems.
Yeah because that negative stuff you mentioned in your slippery slope fallacy hasn’t already been happening under the current system 🙄
Cite your sources
Australia gave the world the Murdochs under the current system. That’s more of a damn source than OP provided, which was none as well.
Ahh yes. Three-fifths of a person. That’s always gone well.
Hell, there’s a sitting US Senator who’s brain dead and being propped up every few weeks for a photo op.
It couldn’t be much sillier than what we have now.
We do not have a US voting system . At all.
we do that in the Senate now
No we don’t. We do proportional representation (per state).
In each of the electorates, votes are weighted equally.
It’s only because of proportion of representatives per person in different states that someone’s vote is technically different.
The problem with weighting votes is that one that’s allowed, if another group comes into power, they can change the weights to suit them by deciding that the currently favoured voters have it alright whereas another group are doing it hard.
According to the article, there is already weighted voting in Australia, not by age but by place. If the weight-loading was legislated I can’t see govts changing the weighting easily.
That is a deceptive argument by the author. The senate represents the interests of the Australian states. Within those states all votes are equal. The senate is a house of review and can block legislation and provides protection for smaller states from the big states concentrating wealth and power even more than they currently do. We wouldn’t have a federation without this concession. WA would be out first and SA and Tassie wouldn’t be far behind.
The real power is in the house of representatives. We have good regional representation through our local MPs which is very important on regional issues like local employment and access to services.
The tweak that would make our system more democratic would be to look at the wasted preferences in the lower house and provide additional seats to parties that got a substantial share without winning any local seats. This would better reflect the will of voters and would be fantastic for the Greens. It would also provide a lot of power to parties like One Nation. I am concerned this could be abused without additional balances. I would want our constitution strengthened and a bill of rights before opening parliament up to far right populists.
If the weight-loading was legislated I can’t see govts changing the weighting easily.
With respect, that’s exactly how they currently change things. By legislation, so they most certainly could change the weighting as easily as they can pass any other legislation.
What I meant by not changing such legislation easily is that it would need to be debated and the public would be able to also have a say.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing something like this be given a trial run for 5-10 yrs to see what outcomes would eventuate.
It is interesting that there is no maximum voting age. It is difficult to construct an argument for a minimum that doesn’t become one for a maximum.
I think we should just implement actual democracy, instead of this bourgeois half-measure. But if we are sticking with elitism a general knowledge test of recent events/political system knowledge/literacy would be a very funny way to weight votes.
A maximum politician age would be a preferable first step if considering age caps.
Australia has preferential compulsory voting. If people here wanted to vote for a geriatric local representative then so be it. Better for the people to make that decision and to be able to take it back than to live under the boot of an autocracy.
Since we elect local and state representatives and not a tyrant any old person has to exhibit some level of political ability to navigate party politics to the front bench.
We cop a lot of distorted shit from US politics here. To the point we have lost MAGAs wandering around. The average age of their reps is 57 and their senate is 65. Their tyrant is an 80 year old with obvious dementia. Our PM is 63 and the average is 52 here. I want to see more 30 year olds in parliament and I think the average age needs to be closer to 40. I think we do this by getting young people away from their phones and into community orgs and public service not by age restrictions. How are we going to level up our young people to take on public service? It is a struggle to fill the positions on local sporting clubs and community groups. Scrolling on your phone is not participation.
I would vehemently endorse such a bill. Under the guise of ‘All Australians retire at x’. I’d propose that number to be ~70 years old.
Interestingly, our politics aren’t too bad at this. Only 4/226 members in parliament and senate are over this age (they’re all blokes of course). Contrast to the USA where this is a far bigger issue - over a third of their senators are over 70 and a fifth of their house members (not sure what the term for those is) are over 70.
Children are represented by their parents who advocate for them.
Old people need to advocate for themselves.
A poll test is anti-democratic as hell, and a step towards authoritarianism.
But if we are sticking with elitism
…
would be a very funny way
considering the emphasised text extracted from the above passage what do you think the author’s stance on the article is?
Why do you think she used those terms? Are they at odds with her opinion or reenforcing it?
Consider the way the author has described the current system as a “bourgeois half-measure” contrasted with “actual democracy” what do you think the author imagines instead? Where else has similar language been used in relation to critiques of European representative democracy?
Probably some slopulist led revolution to institute communism, followed by a million or so deaths, societal collapse, and a century of no true Scotsman fallacies defending it. I don’t listen to commie critiques because they are all illiterate and ahistoric hacks, and I don’t take anything they say as quaint or humorous because they are amoral campists who hide behind masks.
Thanks for the flashback to high school
Apparently some here need basic reading comprehension revisted ¯\(ツ)/¯
How can you have a real democracy when the majority of voters only ever vote for 2 parties?
Fix the system as much as you want, but how do you fix the voters?
Well if you remove the parties and get people voting directly on issues instead, you’re one step closer to a real democracy.
Representative democracy is just a way for the lobbyists and rich to have all the power by buying a few people and spamming them with financial/media support to win and advance their agenda.
Direct democracy is a pretty flawed and exhausting way to do things. It’s very rare that a person has strong knowledge and interest in more than one or two domains and so consultation is necessary. Every individual replicating that work is an idealistic fantasy.
You can look at how rapidly interest in repeat votes falls off in cases like the French revolution. Copying a model of recallable ground up councils seems more sensible to me.
Local people get together and send some number of speaking/voting representatives to the next tier of organising body and so on. Meetings are always open, but only these representatives have the right to speak so you can actually get stuff done. People who aren’t happy with how the people they chose are doing can always recall them and choose again. You aim to have consensus as a process for approval with quorum establishment to break critical lock ups. Power can be devolved to higher councils but recalled by the lower ones, so ultimately the seat of power is the local level where people are much more engaged and social mechanisms help temper abuse of power.
It’s undoubtably slower and less efficient, but stuff like the anarchist councils in the Spanish civil war shows it can work I think. It would require trial and revision.
edit: importantly though we can’t say we live democratically if the majority of social arrangements necessary for live are dictatorial. Housing, work, and community life must be transformed. Voting on some law or trade treaty and then going to your completely disenfranchised job to pay rent for your disenfranchised housing is not democracy in any material sense.
I wouldn’t trust Australians to vote directly on issues, these are the same people who made the ford ranger and toyota hilux the highest selling vehicles for years, even though the majority of Australians live in cities.
There is no doubt that the system is broken, and the majority of politicians, and parties are corrupt, but the people make really bad choices.
big car therefore no vote
ladies, gents, gremlins: political enlightenment
I wonder what the polling on big car voting preferences would be…
“Australians can’t be trusted to vote, instead they should vote for someone who certainly cannot be trusted”
Politicians are the same people who support Israel, are in bed with LLM data centres, do jack shit on climate issues, focus on corporations over people, etc.
More often than not politicians act against the wishes of Australians.
That is true because the majority of politicians are right wing (including the alp), yet the people still keep voting for them.
it is the same as blaming billionaires and corporations for everything wrong in the world, many of them are definitely bad, but it is the people who fund them by using their products and services. Blaming them changes nothing, they don’t really care about the blame, as long as they still get your money.
If you want a better world, be a better person, boycott dodgy companies, don’t vote for dodgy politicians. There has been a decent choice on every single ballot that I have ever seen, they are surrounded by bad choices, but they are there.
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not applicable to aus anywhere afaik
Did that over a century ago.
Then half of the Aussie population (or more) wouldn’t be able to vote! You are being super-elitist! 😆
I think we should just implement actual democracy.
Agree.
Why would you need a maximum voting age? If someone has the maturity and clarity to vote, they should vote.
Why would you need a maximum voting age?
didn’t you read the article ? it’s actually answered.
Someone aged 80 voting vs someone aged 18. The polices implemented by an 80 yr olds choice will effect the 18 yr old for many decades.
i think we should lower the voting age to the age of criminal responsibility, surely if someone is able to to be some criminal mastermind, they have the wherewith all to vote.
You’ve responded to me but I think you meant to respond to someone else.
I have not proposed a max voting and and yes, I did read the article and I thought it was so interesting that I posted it here.
No matter where people stand, it’s great to see that they care about our democracy.
I did say it’d be funny, not good.
RE max: just as human brains start life half formed and silly, they end life that way too. It is well established that we suffer cognitive decline after a lifetime of various insults to the brain and general aging. Nobody is ever as sharp as they were in the mid twenties. We try and make up for this with wisdom but we all go to the grave early or a shell of ourselves.
The cognitive arguments around a minimum extend to a maximum. Realistically you can’t, but you can’t have a well defined minimum either. I think it would be cool to let anyone interested vote, provided they can pass some general knowledge stuff first if they’re say under 16 or 14 or something to demonstrate they’re cognizent of what they’re doing.
We’re on the same page but not the same paragraph.
If we’re gonna be ageist and generalise I’ll add my 20c worth. In your mid-twenties you are neither more or less sharp than in your mid-sixties or even seventies. Much has to do with genetic, developmental, cultural and particularly lifestyle factors. A twenty-something person who has lived in physical, social, or cultural deprivation is unlikely to be as sharp as a sixty-something person who has lived in relative affluence which would be marked by healthy nutrition, reasonable educational opportunities, contacts, stability, etc.
General knowledge is also culturally loaded.
Anyway, I won’t rave on. The gist is that generalising about personal attributes like age, gender, etc, is a bit silly and not useful. They cannot be used as sole indicators of anything. We grow and develop out of a complex of factors and we need to implement real democracy, as you say, and also work towards a much fairer and just society than we have now.
Age related cognitive decline is extremely well documented. There is no way around it, you can slow it sometimes but everyone shows decline, it’s well established. Particularly between 60-80 decline starts becoming rapid.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41999-025-01377-8 for example is a longitudinal study of several hundred adults. They find:
Advancing age was associated with poorer performance across all cognitive domains. Processing speed and executive indices declined earliest, with significant decrements evident in the early 70 s. Neither linear regression nor ANCOVA using test year revealed any improvement in neuropsychological test performance; instead, significant deterioration across multiple domains was observed.
If you think people can be too young to think clearly because their brain is far enough from a healthy adult human’s as to represent one unsuitable for decision making you necessarily must draw the same conclusions around aged brains. It’s not bias, it’s just decay. We all rot in the end
You cant use age as a discriminatior for cognition. There’s plenty of older people who are more congniscent than people of a younger age.
If you think people can be too young to think clearly because their brain is far enough from a healthy adult human’s as to represent one unsuitable for decision making you necessarily must draw the same conclusions around aged brains.
What I am saying is that all of us, no matter our age, are affected by multiple, complex factors and that we shouldn’t be too quick to generalise. Our body does wear down but this doesn’t have to affect decision-making. Some go to their deaths in their 90s with a very lucid mind, some start getting dementia symptoms in their 40s and some a lot earlier, including childhood. We are all affected by a society which tends to promote health-reducing habits and environments for reasons of profit and then there are genetic factors in the mix as well. There’s quite a bit of research at present on healthy old age.
From the moment we are born, we are one day closer to our death but that doesn’t mean we must accept how we fare according to general trends. Our intelligence changes, not only declines, and we can play a conscious role in this.
The only viable idea is lowering to 16.
Weighted votes sounds like a nice voting model idea but half the reason for democracy is thats how govs obtain legitmacy. Weighted votes are pretty illegitmate.
We cant fix the issue of young voters being ignored by changing the voting system unfortuntely
I also think that 16-year-olds could vote but it should not be obligatory until they turn 18.
I’m not so sure that weighted votes would be illegitimate (but I am not an expert). If young people’s voice had more weight they could counter some of the awful decisions being made.
Whilst I’m in agreement that the elderly don’t have to live with the decisions they make, I don’t think this is the answer. After all, why not say babies have the highest weighting as they’ll have to deal with the fallout for the longest.
So the simple answer…make the elderly work menial jobs nobody else wants until they drop dead. This solves their other complaint that too.many foreigners keep coming over and working in farms. Problem solved. Or develop a “Logan’s Run” type system instead.
Hey, not all seniors think like bigots.
Babies and children can’t vote for obvious reasons.
I dunno, makes as much sense as weighing different voters votes OP.
Young people are too busy buying mcdonalds on ubereats while looking for kardashian merch on amazon.
You lot are as bad as the baby boomers, you would use ai to count the votes.
I have a few people round me that are in the 60-83 age range. I gotta tell you aging is a heart breaking bitch.
My Nan can’t remember what she ate for breakfast, she keeps breaking her TV and then demanding that we buy her a new one to replace it.
So we set it up for her and within a couple of hours she is confused, scared and upset. Demands we take it away and that we get her old TV fixed.
The local repair guys have said they can no longer buy parts for the 720P No name LCD that she actually knows how to use. So next time it breaks we are in for a world of pain.
She is more irrational, scared and confused than at any point in her life before now. Also more opinionated and convinced that she is right (in between the meltdowns when she realises what she has lost).
Her vote counts for everybit as much as mine does. Until we get her gerontologist to complete an AEC exemption application and send it in at least.
That sounds like your nan might have dementia, because of that you believe everyone over the age of 60 has dementia.
Based on that ‘logic’ it is okay for me to believe that everyone under 30 is an undereducated, self-absorbed, ai using crypto bro, with the attention span of a pineapple.
We could apply similar ‘logic’ to every generation.
Oh she has dementia alright, early stages, hence the reference to the Gerontologist. Specifically a doctor who manages conditions with a high association with age. I am not saying that everyone in a certain age bracket has it, just using an example. But let me be clear, someone retaining full capacity of their mental faculties into their twilight years is simply not common enough to be statistically worth talking about. I have worked in industries that intersect with the elderly and know that special provisions have to be made. I also agree that young people are not doing an amazing job of demonstrating competency. But pretending the accumulated wisdom of 70+ years somehow offsets the decline in neuroplasticity is disingenuous at best. I would suggest talking to some people in aged care and asking them how often their clients/patients are the model of rationality and reason.
I am really concerned that society being what it is now, with so many life-related systems compromised by inequitable access to wealth, oligarchical and other types of undemocratic rule, unhealthy food, mind-controlling and body-affecting technology, pollution, etc, etc., we may be in for ever-growing levels of cognitive decline at earlier ages accompanied by growing levels of neurodivergent conditions in children as well as mental health problems in general. We really need to concentrate on the causes of growing unhealth and stick together, not let the system make us more defensive and isolated. Know the real enemy.
We are also in a period where we can acknowledge that people exist on a spectrum and people change. My youngest son has ADHD, we got him treatment, support and flexible learning arrangements that mean 99.9% of the time he can be a “regular” kid with a “regular” life. When I was his age it was just drug them, pack them into the special class and forget about them. As much as I agree with your sentiment we do live in slightly enlightened times.
We assume elderly people are going to struggle with people taking advantage of them in so many other aspects of life, why do we let the media and politicians get away with it?
To be clear, I am not advocating for stripping anyone’s rights, or giving them a lessened voting weight. I don’t actually have a solution. I just think it’s the sort of thing a mature democracy would be able to discuss in good faith. Instead we get to be told about how much privacy and personal sovereignty we want to sacrifice in the name of “won’t somebody think of the children”.
Yes, you are right. There certainly is a deeper and growing understanding of neurodivergence and I am happy for you that your boy is being treated as he should be. I’ve often wondered if I have some neurodivergence myself.
And I also agree with your other ppints.
ironic usage of “ingenious”
“But let me be clear, someone retaining full capacity of their mental faculties into their twilight years is simply not common enough to be statistically worth talking about” arrogance and ignorance go hand in hand.
Stated by someone who obviously has ample quantities of both. I’m not as sharp as I was a decade ago, or two decades ago for that matter. I can see the decline and I am only in my 40s. If you can’t say the same then congratulations.
I can see the decline while reading your comments.
Up until a couple of years ago when she moved, I had a 97 year old neighbour who was sharper than I am, she was a racist though.
We all decline over time, that much is true, but the suggestion that a 20 year old will make a better decision than a 60 year old is still complete bullsh*t
Consumerism spans generations, as does racism, sexism etc etc, the most recent generations have not changed any of that, they just dive right into it all while blaming previous generations… for being like them.
OP is clearly a 16 year old
Cool, remind me again what the plural of anecdote is… Is it data? It has to be data right?
I gotta say you got my Boomer sense tingling.
You seem angry, and confused. That’s a common state of mind as people get on in years. Relax, have a cuppa and if this is the way you feel on a regular basis consider talking to your GP, they can help out with resources and support to help you in this time of transition.
