Should senior suffrage be revoked?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Should senior suffrage be revoked?

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

What we need to do is bring back weighted voting. Divide the population into age brackets like in the graphic in the OP, and then calculate a factor for each bracket to figure out how their vote is weighted. The oldest group is defined as having a weight of 1. In this case, you end up with:

Vote weight
18-24: 4.3
25-49: 3.3
50-64: 1.9
65+: 1

Applying those values to the Remain/Leave numbers above, and the total population of each bracket, you'd end up with:

59 million votes for Remain
50.9 million votes for Leave.

Adjusting for turnout, Remain would still win, unless turnout among the 18-24 and 24-49 brackets dropped to around 40% while the other two were at 100%. We have thus succeeded in our objective of nullifying old farts.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2016 17:12

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:18

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

PT6A posted:

The real problem is that seniors have more influence in democratic systems because they're reliable voters, and young people are not. If you want to fix that, the solution is for young people to get off their loving lazy asses and exercise their right to vote, not to take it away from other people. There aren't so many seniors that they would comprise a majority in pretty much any western society, it's just that they're the ones who're actually voting.

Alternatively, to offset the structural differences which allow older citizens to vote more regularly, divide voters into age brackets and multiply the votes in any given bracket to be equal to a 100% turnout.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2016 18:52

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

WampaLord posted:

How about we make election days a national holiday?

Or extend early voting in all states?

Or have mail in voting available in all states?

Basically we should expand voting rights and not be reducing anyone's votes.

We're not all living in America dude, I'm coming up with an international solution.

xwing posted:

Like maybe keeping polls open longer? But no, lets propose an easily manipulated weighting system. If you're too lazy to vote, I don't care about your opinion. Older people show up because... *gasp* they know voting matters, something they've learned in their life.

But this system doesn't care about the opinion of the people who are too laze to vote. Rather, it takes the people who go against the trends in their age bracket and rewards them with more influence, for being good citizens who take their responsibilities seriously. Deciding to vote when half your peers decide not to clearly proves you're deserving of a greater say, while doing the same when 90% of your peers vote is not such a big deal. This system would also encourage politicians to care more about the youth vote, which in turn could make young people care more about politics, rather than decide it's just for old people because those are the only ones politicians care about.

PT6A posted:

Oh you mean like being more likely to be poor and in ill health? Yeah, those olds sure have it made!

It is far from a given that old people are more likely to be poor, depending on the country. In any case, no one claimed old people had it made.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2016 20:21

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

boom boom boom posted:

IIRC, there's also some big discrepancies in voter turnout among different races. Would your system apply to race too?

Absolutely. Of course there is the issue of ensuring anonymity and not somehow making it easier to gently caress with votes, but I'm assuming that's possible. If not then it's obviously back to the drawing board.

my dad posted:

To nip this one in the bud, A Buttery Pastry's posts tend to be homages to "A Modest Proposal"

Sorry for ruining the joke, everyone.

Tend to would be stretching it, I think. Occasionally maybe. I'm not entirely joking here though, even if I'm not certain either how workable a solution it would be, but I figured coming up with alternate ideas to simply going "Can't vote after 65" would be more interesting than just writing "No, senior suffrage should not be revoked".

# ¿ Jun 30, 2016 20:38

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

By structural differences you actually mean young kids are "too loving lazy" correct? Because trying to get the new high score in Asteroids! or whatever the gently caress kids are playing these days isn't a structural disadvantage.

It's actually because old people are so under-stimulated that getting to vote is a real rush for them.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2016 14:20

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Periodiko posted:

It's not actually a given that old people vote more conservatively. The generation that came of age during The Great Depression and voted for FDR was a very reliable Democratic voting bloc for years. I'm also pretty sure that Social Security and Medicare have survived as long as they have because of old people.

For how many years? The Democrats were a very different party back then, with their main base of support being white supremacists in the South. That only changed after the Civil Rights Act, which broke the anti-civil rights coalition among the democrats, and then Nixon openly courting them as part of his Southern Strategy, which flipped the South to the Republicans and created the modern Republican party.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2016 08:54

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:18

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

rudatron posted:

Like even if old people in general have empirically false and absurd beliefs, it's still dumb on every level to do this - the question to ask is 'why?'. Find the root, and pull that out. Ignoring the problem only delays its resolution.

I see what you're saying; we need to pull out old people's brains, since their brains having ossified around what they knew decades ago is why they generally have empirically false and absurd beliefs.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2016 13:57

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Should senior suffrage be revoked?