One Child, One Vote: “Strong Families” or Vote Farms?

by T.L. James | 11:12 am, October 16, 2009 | 8 Comments

Via a (barely-literate) Facebook comment this morning, I discovered 1Child1Vote (aka onechildonevote.org). The organization’s focus is, as the title suggests, “one child, one vote” – voting rights for all U.S. citizens, regardless of age.

And they do mean “regardless of age” quite literally.

The very moment a child is born on United States soil, he or she automatically acquires US citizenship (14th Amendment of the US Constitution: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” ), with all the rights and responsibilities citizenship entails. Among the rights of US citizens is the right to vote. And with that vote, citizens can defend their other rights, protect their interests, and ensure their needs are met…

Who looks after those interests? The child’s parents or legal guardians, presumably. And the State, supposedly, through policies and legislation enacted by our elected representatives. But those “representatives” represent their constituents, and more particularly, their voters. It is through the vote that citizens defend their interests in the democratic arena.

Today, the last disenfranchised group to be discriminated against and denied the right to vote, as yesterday women and blacks were, is the group formed by United States citizens under 18 years of age. It is precisely the children in our society who will live longer with the consequences of election results. They are the most affected by them (war, debt, pollution, low wages…); how illogical that it is precisely they who are excluded from participating.

The most cost-efficient, revolutionary change for the good of everyone in America today, is to recognize that all persons who are citizens of the United States, regardless of age, have the Right to Vote, and then, to facilitate the exercise of this Right. Representation of the minor by his or her guardian, tutor, caretaker or legal representative, is a common and widely accepted practice for the exercise of his or her estate-related or other rights. It is incongruous that this representation should not be applied in the case of the most important of all political rights, preserver of all other rights. [emphasis in original]

As an aside, I’ve also heard the gun referred to as “the preserver of all other rights”. I have to wonder if the people behind this effort would support extending all Constitutional rights to minors, or just the vote? After all, a child with a ballot will vote the way their parent or guardian or community organizer or other authority figure tells them to, but a child with a gun might actually shoot them.

I do recognize that there is a gray area in the mid-to-late teens, when some individuals have sufficient maturity and knowledge to exercise the franchise. Unfortunately, there’s no workable or fair way to determine this ability on a case-by-case basis across the millions of children under the age of eighteen who fall into that gray zone. Eighteen may be an arbitrary age at which to recognize the franchise, but until some means of assessing (over a large number of individuals) whether a person has in fact attained some minimal qualifications to be considered an adult, any selected age will be arbitrary. Further, any such qualifications besides simple properties like age are themselves going to be arbitrary and open to charges of unfairness.

This in fact seems to be the basis of 1Child1Vote’s childlike reasoning: since any age-based recognition of the franchise is inherently arbitrary, why then, we simply shouldn’t have one. Missing the point entirely that the arbitrary nature of the age traditionally used doesn’t invalidate the reasons a standard is desirable. Further, their fatuous comparison of the restriction of voting rights to adults to prior denials of voting rights to women and blacks is a category error which amounts to equating the undeveloped intellectual capacity of newborns and toddlers with the unacknowledged abilities of fully-developed adults in those categories.

All that said, of course the real goal here is not to have toddlers pulling the levers in voting booths, nor is it protecting the rights or public policy interests of children. The real goal is to expand the number of votes available while allowing those additional votes to be exercised by proxy by parents, guardians, or (presumably) other legally-authorized adults. It’s merely another corrupt means of stuffing the ballot box, in this case dipped in treacly ”For the Children!™” sentiments.

Far from escaping them, arbitrary standards will be a major factor even if those supporting this policy got their way.  While some teenagers in that gray area of young adulthood might responsibly exercise the franchise otherwise denied them by the age-18 standard, obviously a fresh-from-the-womb newborn will be neither physically nor mentally capable of voting, and so their vote would of necessity be exercised by proxy (see below). But what of all the children in between? The gray area doesn’t simply go away - instead of an arbitrary but equal age standard, there would be the undefinable and hence unavoidably subjective ”qualification” standard I alluded to above. At what age or under what conditions would a child be guaranteed the right to vote unhindered and without the oversight of the adult who until then had functioned as their proxy?

Then there are the policy questions regarding which adult gets to exercise the proxy vote on behalf of a particular child, how those proxies would be allocated in the case of divorce or intra-family adoptions, whether the noncustodial parent or the guardian (in the case of foster care, for example) has exercise of a child’s voting rights, how the votes of unplaced orphans (direct wards of the state) would be executed, etc. Just imagine how much more complicated the Gosselin mess would be with womb-to-tomb voting, or the strife in a family whose parents are polar opposites like James Carville and Mary Matalin, where the manipulation and pressuring of the young children during an election season would be incessant.

Further, there are the unintended consequences to consider. Parents might decide or be induced to have or adopt children in large numbers, whether to acquire more votes for their own interests, or out of loyalty to or in response to bribery from a particular party or cause. Such families could quickly grow beyond the parents’ means to provide for them, putting an increased strain on public services and creating a positive feedback loop where politicians are incentivized to pander to such families on promises to expand such services, permitting more such families to be created. Worse, those unscrupulous enough to produce or adopt children for their votes would probably be unscrupulous enough to cast those children off after an election has been concluded and their vote is no longer needed for the next eighteen months or so – let public and private child services deal with them in the period between elections, and then retrieve or adopt them in time for the next primaries! Given the examples of utilitarian bad parenting one can find in any newspaper, welfare office, or school, is anyone going to argue that this wouldn’t happen?

Since they didn’t tout any examples themselves, I have to ask: does any other country in the world not restrict its voting rights to adults? I was honestly surprised not to see at least one example offered of how Country X has crib-to-casket voting and how wonderful it has been for their children and society.

There’s no obvious way to tell how big this organization is (it could just be some wannabe doogooder with a website), but it touts its association with Strong Families Inc., another website/organization with the same views on the minor vote (along with the same address). Indeed, 1Child1Vote seems to be little more than a copy of chunks of Strong Familes’ web content, and is probably little more than a puppet site set up to drive links and traffic to the main site and make it appear larger.

Strong Families has a bit more detail than 1Child1Vote, and includes this little gem, which proves my point about parents voting for their children by proxy:

As with all other rights they make use of as minors, they should be represented at the voting booth by their parents or whoever holds their legal guardianship.

By their own logic, then, my (hypothetical) single-mom neighbor with three young children becomes four times the citizen I am, so long as her children remain incapable (by some arbitrary standard) of voting independently and so long as she doesn’t remarry.

Elsewhere, they do the math and show that 90 million votes are suppressed by the minimum age on voting, an amount equal to childless adults. That’s food for thought, isn’t it?

So who is Strong Families Inc.?

It hasn’t been around long enough to generate a lot of Google results.

It turns up in Watchdog.net as a tax-exempt but not 501(c)(3) charitable “social welfare” organization.

It appears to be a project of Michael Kenwood Consulting at the same physical address, which (not “who”) is an association of independent consultants who “dare to think differently” and “offer tradition and imagination for strategic innovation”. And manageriolalia. Lots of manageriolalia. And investment consulting.

My first instinct was that Strong Families was a “Progressive” organization, but I’m not sure it isn’t a social-con organization given the (pardon the pun) focus on the family.

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