Shouldn't This Be a Gaffe?

The right to vote is, justly, seen as more or less the single most important political right in a free society. Mainly this is because the vote is the simplest weapon to use in protecting all of your other rights. Accordingly, almost everyone in most nations not currently adhering to either the Islamic or the Communist philosophies agree (at least in public) that all adult citizens should have the right to vote. Disenfranchisement based on wealth, race, gender, religion, all of these have come to be seen as deeply illegitimate. But of course there's that pesky word "adult" in the formula. Everyone also agrees that it's basically meaningless to talk about giving a one-month-old infant the right to vote; the closest you could come would be to let their parents vote for them, which violates other rules like not having some people voting twice. So we need to have some way to figure out who, like the infant, can be legitimately disenfranchised and who must be given their vote. I, as someone who would probably have ranked upwards of 90th percentile in the whole country for pure political informedness when I was fourteen, have been known to wish there were some kind of test that teenagers could take to qualify to vote early, but that approach is typically rejected rather thoroughly. Instead we just draw a bright line at some particular age. It used to be twenty-one in this country, then we moved it to eighteen when the whole "old enough to fight" thing got pointed out. In fact the voting age is 18 in the vast majority of the world, though it's 16 in Brazil and 20 in Japan (where that's the traditional age of adulthood). I think you can make a reasonable argument that 18 is too high, and I think you can also make a reasonable argument that it's too low, though I wouldn't be inclined to make that argument myself.

You can also make a reasonable argument, I think, that the current way American elections law treats college students is a little bit silly. I spent the first eighteen years of my life living primarily in New Jersey, and will have spent the next four spending most of my time in Rhode Island, but still considering New Jersey my home. So naturally in 2009 I voted in New Jersey while a college student at Brown, in 2010 I voted in Rhode Island, and in 2011 and 2012 I expect to vote in New Jersey again. I get to jurisdiction-hop. Will I spend any time living in Rhode Island after I graduate? Who knows? Likewise New Jersey. That this way of doing things is the best possible solution is not, I think, immediately self-evident, though I myself (being a rather emphatic small-d democrat) wouldn't like to make it more stringent. But I think you can argue that it should be more strict and not be a horrible person.

But here's what you can't do. You can't say what the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives said to a Tea Party meeting recently in support of a bill against college student voting rights. He said that college kids are "foolish" when they vote, lack "life experience," and "just vote their feelings." But that's not all he said. The unforgivable offense that college kids commit when voting? "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do." This, see, is what it's not okay to say. This is not a respectable argument. This is the "you disagree with me, so you're doing it wrong" argument. I myself happen to be of the opinion that there are a lot of relatively more aged white persons in this country who have an instinctive, emotional reaction against the idea of a multicultural, culturally liberated society, and "just vote their feelings" in favor of oppression. There are a whole lot of other people who I think are damn foolish for, to use an example that isn't picking on the right wing, having voted for Ralph effing Nader in 2000. I'd even call any of those people who lived in a swing state downright stupid, at least with respect to their decisions on voting that year.

But you don't get to disenfranchise those people. It's possible that if we made voting a privilege that you had to demonstrate some degree of political literacy to qualify for, and could potentially lose, the quality of governance would increase. I don't think it's likely, but I have to admit it's possible. But the legitimacy of government would go to zero, instantly and immediately. And this proposal is even worse. It's not enough that this guy is arguing in favor of a policy that you can make a pretty good argument for if you've a mind. He said, explicitly, that he wants to disenfranchise college students because they vote Democratic. There's no way that allowing the party in power to disenfranchise those who will vote against them can make government better. It's just a pure power grab. It's nothing but oppressing and persecuting your political enemies. We aren't supposed to do that in this country.
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