Lowering the Voting Age: a follow-up

On voter registration, civics education and paying our taxes.

A recent post on whether New Zealand should lower the age of eligibility to vote to 16 generated a lot of comment.

Should the voting age be 16? Have your say.

So a follow-up post is called for.

Alongside the human rights (or age discrimination) declaration made by the Supreme Court, the strongest point in favour of 16 is the potential to increase participation in elections. At 16, or even a little before, students could be registered as voters while at school. Enrolment at or after 18 is complicated by changes such as leaving school, working, going to uni, etc. Many people don’t get around to registering until their late 20s or early 30s.

For the 2023 election, only 66 percent of 18–24 year-olds were enrolled. That meant roughly 142,000 young Kiwis not enrolled but legally eligible to vote. As a percentage of total enrolled, 74.2 percent in that age-group actually voted, which is not bad. But, given the low enrolment rate, that was only a 47.5 percent turnout in the total eligible population of 18–24 year-olds.

From 35 onwards, over 90 percent of Kiwis are enrolled, and the turnout rates (per registered voters) in older age-groups (55 and over) exceeded 80 percent in 2023. When looking at turnout rates, it’s essential to check whether the figures are a proportion of “registered voters” or “estimated eligible population”. That makes a big difference among the younger age-groups.

If schools could register everyone and explain what it was for, that would help boost engagement and turnout rates. It’s legally compulsory in NZ to register, on pain of a fine not exceeding $100 on first conviction (see s 82 Electoral Act 1993), so the schools would be helping young people comply with the law. (If anyone can find a report of a person being fined for not registering, please put a link into comments!)

Many readers will still be unconvinced about lowering the age of eligibility to 16, though. Even if we could prove that higher turnouts would follow from it (and there is some overseas evidence), those opposed may invoke countervailing values. Just because some research concludes that doing A is likely to lead to beneficial outcome B doesn’t necessarily mean that we ought to do A. We have to weigh up all the relevant evidence and the values at stake. The (totally unscientific) straw poll I ran had 60 percent saying “no” to 16. When I looked at Stuff’s reader poll, 80 percent had ticked “no”. But then, just because a majority say something doesn’t make it right either, and public opinion can shift over time.

Maturity was an issue in some comments. Whether any adult is “mature” enough to vote conscientiously and responsibly is a moot point, depending on the individual, and not only on their age. A reader queried the word “impressionable” in reference to the young. That’s an adjective used in the literature (Neundorf & Smets, 2015) and may mean “open to new ideas”, and so isn’t necessarily underestimating young people’s merits as voters. Our political opinions and values are consolidating during those formative years and into the early 20s. How big a barrier, if any, is that to casting a vote? One could argue that giving people civic responsibilities stimulates their development as responsible citizens.

Some commenters used the centuries-old maxim of “no taxation without representation”. Originally, the right to vote was limited to men who owned or leased taxable property. The Chartist Movement in the 1830s pressed for universal male suffrage, which was granted in New Zealand in 1879, and then women in 1893. The journey to “one person, one vote” was slow, however: the country quota, which weighted representation ratios in favour of rural electorates, was abolished only in 1945.

Taxation has always been at the heart of the right to vote. Income tax had begun in the United Kingdom in 1799 and became more widely applied during the nineteenth century. The raising of taxes is associated historically with rising costs of warfare, and this was certainly the case in the twentieth century with massive public borrowing and expenditure on all-out wars. Representation in legislatures that controlled governments’ finances was originally reserved for those who paid tax on property. Hence, as the sources of taxation expanded beyond land and its produce to include a percentage of wages, workers’ claims on the rights to vote and to stand for office became stronger. With income taxes plus conscription, enfranchisement logically followed for all men and women, originally 21 and over. The wider the range of people called upon to work, to serve at war and to pay tax, the wider the franchise. “No taxation without representation” seems to work in reverse: “no representation without taxation”. If you want to vote, then contribute your share.

Civics education is another matter that routinely comes up along with this issue of the voting age. Political scientists have known for a long time that most people (of all age-groups) don’t really know a lot about what their governments are doing and how they do it. See Ilya Somin on political ignorance. There’s little incentive for voters to spend much time learning about it (the famous Downs hypothesis), whereas it doesn’t cost much time to vote. Representative government is a “vote and forget” system, and people’s voting choices aren’t always very well-informed, even at older ages. And, by the way, being “ignorant” about politics and government doesn’t mean that a person is unintelligent. Plenty of very smart people lack the relevant knowledge, and conversely many political scientists may be ignorant about, for instance, theoretical physics or plumbing.

Having taught first-year university students about the NZ system of government, I am aware (and they are aware) of how little they’ve learned (if anything other than the Treaty) at school – especially when compared with exchange students, and especially those from the US where they have a handy document called “The US Constitution” from which to learn. It’s easy enough in principle to design a school curriculum for Kiwis on the topic (see for example my talk about the electoral system), but I can imagine an argument erupting: should it teach children that the parliamentary system was imposed by white supremacists and imperialists in 1852–54, or that it’s a noble tradition that’s upheld our liberties since the thirteenth century, or a bit of both? And I’ll let readers comment sagely on that.

The universal franchise, giving each person’s vote equal weight, undoubtedly made representation more democratic – or less aristocratic and less patriarchal – than restricting the vote to property-owning men. But the universal franchise on its own didn’t transform capitalist societies run by landed and moneyed elites into effective democracies. As noted above, most people remain uninformed about, and uninvolved in, their government, and the rich minority are more likely to get their way than the non-rich majority.

Should the voting age be 16? In New Zealand, the jury is still out.