Anti-Climacus

WELL: Bill Wallo has some thoughts in response to my whole little voting thing I've been talking about recently. My fault for posting when my idea was half finished, but this is sort of an outline (I think) of my thought process:

1. There's probably an argument to be made that raising the voting age to 21 isn't completely insane (my rationale was that a lot of the experiences you'd like a voter to have they can make it to 18 without having, but it's harder (if not impossible) for them to not have had them by 21).

2. Attempts to restrict the youth vote artificially* are as silly as attempts to raise it: there is no 'youth vote' that's a cohesive unit in any relevant sense (except that they tend to vote less often than other age cohorts, but there are explanations for that which are more broadly explanatory than that politicians aren't appealing to them**.

3. There are a lot of situations (some of which 18-21 year olds fall under, some of which they do not) that should be troubling to people who believe voting expresses the well-considered will of the people: the possibility of voting for on the basis of no rational considerations whatsoever (the coin-flip example, for certain, possibly also the trend to vote like one's parents); the possibilty of a vote being bought (still, strictly speaking, an expression of the individual's preferences (their well-considered vote is less important than x dollars or favors)); and the reality that people are able to vote for things where the cost gets dumped entirely onto other people (the greenbelt example: it may be the case that people are allowed to vote to, essentially, decide other people's taxes for them, but you'd need another argument to say that it's right that things are like that).

4. You might think, in spite of all these problems (and others, such as the general unknowability of social preferences and the troublingly strong effect voting rules have on outcomes (especially with Arrow's Theorem kept in mind), as I do, that voting is still the best way of expressing preferences in democracy***. I don't think you can argue that it's well-considered and other-minded in any of the ways people who want to talk about democracy generally do.

*which I'm not advocating, but the specific issue as it comes up in Ann Arbor is generally that wards have been divided up to split the student vote so prevent a majority in any ward (though if students actually voted in appreciable numbers, they could probably win all the wards they're in)

**18-21 year-olds tend not to vote because they don't have issues that are defined in the same way as issues (particularly economic) are defined for people who are older. But, you know, get a serious job, start a family, and you start to worry about these things.

***well, second best. I have a theory (which I'll probably elaborate on later), that it doesn't really matter that most people don't vote, because the dimensionality of political space is defined by everyone collectively and prior to party formation, candidate selection, interest group action or voter awareness.