What If Your 3-Year-Old Could Vote?
A deep dive on the ins and outs of (and disagreements within) the children’s suffrage movement. As a treat.
Last year, in the lead up to the U.S. presidential election, I did some reporting on an expanding and politically diverse group of academics and activists who want to let kids (like, all of them) vote, for a piece that didn’t end up getting published (it happens). In light of the United Kingdom’s recent decision to lower its voting age to 16, I figured I’d publish an updated version here on Substack for paid subscribers. Anyway, here’s 2,500 words about the ins and outs of (and disagreements within) the children’s suffrage movement. If you like my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so that I can keep it up! I’m currently running a 50% off sale on annual subscriptions, so if you are considering upgrading, now is the time!
In the late 18th century, the English writer and philanthropist Hannah More observed that the Enlightenment era emphasis on individual rights had imbued domestic life with a certain “revolutionary spirit.” Consideration of the rights of men had inevitably raised questions about the rights of women. It was only natural that what followed would be “grave descants on the rights of children.”
Over 200 years and several waves of feminism later, More’s words hold a surprising amount of relevance for the current political moment; there is a small but growing movement of academics and activists committed to rethinking the rights of children in modern society. In 2019, John Wall, a Rutgers University professor of philosophy, religion, and childhood studies, founded an institute aimed at advancing “childism,” which is “like feminism but for children.” Just as feminism aims to liberate women from gender-based discrimination, childism seeks to liberate children from age-based discrimination. And just like feminism, a central goal of childism is suffrage.
The idea of letting children vote is hardly new, but it has lately gained more attention. In 2020, Wall teamed up with Robin Chen, a Massachusetts-based voting-rights reform advocate, to found the Children’s Voting Colloquium, through which the two have connected with people all over the world who are committed to the cause of children’s suffrage. Even five years ago, few people in legal academia were seriously considering the matter, Adam Benforado, a Drexel University law professor who has just launched a youth enfranchisement advocacy organization called Minor Power, told me. But in the past year or so, some of his colleagues at top law schools have published papers on the topic. And although children’s suffrage became politically fraught last summer, when a clip of J.D. Vance voicing support for letting parents vote on behalf of their kids was unearthed, the assortment of academics and activists who support enfranchising children—directly or by proxy—is politically diverse.
Since its founding, the United States has been gradually expanding the right to vote—from a small population of land-owning white males to women and people of all races—on the grounds that voting is a fundamental human right. Yet “there are 73 million Americans who have no ability to choose their leaders,” Benforado told me, making children’s suffrage “the unfinished business of American democracy.”
Broadly speaking, those who support giving kids the vote agree on one thing: that the disenfranchisement of children is a problem. From their perspective, it violates fundamental principles of American democracy and warps policymaking in a manner that gives kids the shaft. But that’s about where the consensus ends. The second you get into the particulars—How low should the voting age go? If kids below a certain age can’t vote, should someone else get to vote on their behalf? If so, who?—views split off in different directions. Underlying these disagreements are fundamental questions about what democracies owe their citizens, what adults owe children, and whether those commitments can ever fully be reconciled.