Today is the Victorian state election. For us, we always make going to the polls a family activity with various children stuffing the ballots. This year I went further and delegated my vote to my 8 year old daughter. There were lots of good reasons to do this. First of all, votes don’t really count. According to Andrew Leigh, there are only a handful of elections in Australian history where individual votes may have mattered. In our electorate, Ted Baillieu (the leader of the opposition Liberal party) is the sitting member and it is a very safe Liberal seat. So there is no chance a vote will actually matter.
Second, I have become convinced that there is actually little reason why children who can read at a sufficient level cannot vote. They have opinions. They put more thought into the process. They care about the future. They actually have different views from adults (which is the main point here). And finally, they have the time to put effort in as if their vote mattered (something that I apparently no longer have).
And what was the result, you may ask? Well, it was entirely predictable. My daughter politely took all of the fliers from each party and we discussed each one and what policies they represented. Regular readers will not be surprised that her first preference was for the Greens; which she also applauded for having a name that reflected their party’s stance. Her second preference was Labor as she worried more about the poor than the level of taxation befalling her family. And the rest was as the Green preferences dictated.
My daughter filled out the ballot paper — more neatly than I would have (again another reason why children should vote) — then she gave each of the fliers back to the party members (after all, she stood for not wasting paper) and we got a sausage sizzle (as per Australian tradition). All in all a good exercise.
[PS: Here is an interesting experience of another blogger who let their children vote recently.]
[PPS: Just so it is clear, this was a monitored activity. Of course, legally, it was me voting as the ballot paper was given to me, I was completely involved and it was all under the watchful gaze of our election workers. It is just that there was lots of input from my daughter and help with penmanship. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was encouraging actions that would actually violate our electoral laws.]
I always make my vote really count by putting the DLP last* even on a huge Upper House paper. They get so few votes that each one is important to them. If more people voted beneath the line they would have even less “support” than they get now by default.
* this is a genetically inherited tendency
[…] Following up from my views at the weekend regarding children and voting, Google today released the results of a collaborative project for school children to put forward ideas to deal with climate change. Here are the Top 10 ideas: Include global warming/climate change in school curricula (as part of National Science Standards), so when the students are in charge they can make educated decisions. […]
What I learned from Scrutineering an Election
I scrutineered the 2006 Victorian State Election. Comments are made in the context of the voting systems used there: Preferential for the lower house, and Single Transferable Vote for the upper house. I was in a very safe Labour seat.
HTV cards see…
Francis: you must be pissed at today’s news.
[…] Victorian MP, Evan Thornley, has an intriguing proposition to give households with children more votes; basically, have a child and until they are 18 you get an extra vote. I have said before that the case for not letting children vote is weak. […]
[…] is what to put first. Except that, in every election (federal and state) that I have voted in (I guess with one exception), I have voted the same way and will do so this time around. The hard choice is not whether to put […]
So, kids should get the vote, but not be able to drink, drive, buy pornography? Or should they be granted those rights as well because “they actually have different views from adults”?
I know you are being slightly facetious but if you keep on saying this sort of thing, someone will take it seriously, make a website about it, and then we’ll be having a national conversation about it for a day. No good.
[…] In the meantime, you can read about the experiment by Dean Karlin (who also pals around with Ian Ayres at Yale) on whether children can be bribed to change their allegance. As usual I need to point out that votes cannot actually be sold (despite strong economic reasons to allow it) and even unlike kidneys they can’t even be given away. […]