Introduction
The title of this post might confuse some people, but it is by no means far-fetched. I will admit it involves some click-bait because I do not want to argue here that we should carry 1-year olds to the polling station and let them place an X for the party they prefer. Instead, the idea is that 1-year olds ought to be able to vote but for practical reasons cannot. The tension of these two assumptions must be resolved and that is precisely what I set out to do today.

The Right to Vote
I want to start by justifying the two assumptions I outlined in the introduction. First, is why should a 1-year-old have the right to vote. The answer can be found at the foundations of any democratic system and for simplicity will be split in two arguments although there are undoubtedly more than that. The first argument is a practical one. For a political system to be functional it helps if people can influence the decisions imposed on them. Otherwise, why should you follow the laws imposed on you, especially if they are not in your favour? Think of the following situation. You want to grab dinner with your friends. You disagree on where to go but two of your friends say they will decide and end up deciding against your preferred restaurant. Does not sound very nice, does it? Now instead think of the same situation but you and your friends deliberate the price and quality of each choice. In the end you vote, and your choice ends up as the minority. Still, we feel much better in complying with the imposed decision, right? This is the practical argument. If we want a functional political system, it helps if people at the very least think they can influence decisions. In democracy this influence is achieved in part though voting.

This brings us to the second argument which is an issue of legitimacy. As a citizen of a democratic system, you get to vote and participate in the general political discourse but thus must accept its decisions even when you do not agree. Most people must accept the decisions because they cannot choose their citizenship. If someone cannot choose their citizenship and do not get to vote, then they simply do not live in a democracy. For a political system to be legitimate democracy all citizens must be able to vote. It follows naturally that 1-year olds should be able to vote as well. They were not able to choose their citizenship so for a system to be democratic it must allow them to vote. In addition, minors might not realize their state of oppression but especially when considering teenagers shortly before voting they are very much aware of the fact that decisions are imposed on them while they have few ways to influence them.

Practical Issues of Children Voting
This brings us to the second assumption which is the practical issue of having children vote. To be quite honest I do not think that many children will make voting decisions which are much worse than over voters above 18. The simple reason for this is that while children cannot make informed decisions, they at the very least do not make misinformed decisions. Still, they are more easily manipulated and strategies to gain their votes are likely to not have much to do with actual politics. I am anticipating that the contest to gain children’s votes will quickly devolve into a contest of who has the most attractive party logo. Or maybe who is best able to equip parents with the skills necessary to make their kids vote for the party that they vote for. This would be funny to observe, but not very productive for a democratic system. In any case I think it to be quite obvious why children cannot vote and will not use more of your and my own to time to explain why this is. At what age they can, I do not know, although I am generally in favour of 16. The main reason for this is that with voting cycles being usually every 4 years lowering the voting age to 16 would mean that citizens vote, on average, with 18 for the first time.

Solutions
So, what about the children between 0 and 16? For a democratic system to be legitimate they should be able to vote but because of practical reasons they cannot. Here I quickly want to highlight the severity of this issue using the US as an example. Currently, 22% of US citizens cannot vote due to their age. With a life expectancy of 76 years a US citizen will on average miss 5 elections due to age which make up around a fifth of the 19 votes they could have had in their life. Age excludes every fifth US citizen from voting and makes the average citizen miss one fifth of the votes in which they could have participated.

There are some ways to address this issue. One could be to give parents the votes of their kids. In the best-case parents will use their own vote on issues they are concerned about and use their kids vote on issues that the kid cares about such as better education, child protection, a liveable climate and so on. In the worst-case parents will simply treat their kids votes as they own giving significant power to large families. As you can probably imagine this is not the best of solutions.

Instead, I want to propose something else. Every time a child misses an election due to their age, they get an extra vote once they old enough to vote. If voting age is 16, a child could miss 4 votes until they can vote for the first time. To make up for this, they can then vote twice in the four elections after they are eligible to vote. This would have several positive effects. First it addresses the tension between maintaining a democratic political system while dealing with the practical issue of children not being able to vote. In addition, it gives young people additional votes which is crucial in aging societies especially in Europe and the US where most voters are now over 50. Furthermore, people tend to vote on issues that affect themselves or are close to them. Consequently, issues such as education, childcare and investment in universities are not very popular in political discourse because only a small share of voters are experiencing or have recently experienced them. Still these issues are crucial for a functional society and putting more focus on these issues by letting people to vote twice for every election they missed could help to improve policy making in these fields. There are still some benefits I left undiscussed here just as there are downsides. There are most certainly also other ways to overcome the tensions between maintaining a democratic system while facing the practical issue that children cannot vote. I will conclude my post here however, so it does not become to long and I invite you to think about this issue yourself.