Topics Justice

Question I read the other day that 48% of people over the age of 85 suffer from senile dementia, and that this number increases steeply as people age. Sufferers have difficulty remembering events and people. Even in its early stages, it impacts on decision making and one's ability to form short and long term plans. My question is, one of the reasons for having a voting age is because we believe that children and young people are cognitively unable to understand the full implications of voting. While this isn't true for all children, it is for the majority of kids, justifying an arbitrary, blanket voting age. If there is a point at which a majority of elderly people are cognitively unable to understand the implications of their vote, does this mean we should create an upper voting age limit? Thanks :)

Accepted:
February 20, 2009

Comments

I suspect you are right on many fronts. However, we (in the United States) have a ignoble history of blocking adults from voting, e.g., denying suffrage to women and non-whites. I think ought to make us skeptical of movements to disenfranchise people.

Another way to go, of course, is to enfranchise children - as when the United States lowered the voting age to eighteen from twenty one. Maybe we ought to move the voting age to fifteen or twelve?

Recently someone told me one quick test for dementia is how quickly and accurately you can count back from 100 in units of 7. I flunked. I am thirty four.

But if we are press forward with the imposition of minimum cognitive standards then we would need some fair system for discerning which elderly citizens have enough capacity to vote from those that do not; the blanket approach we take with minors would be hard to defend when imposed on seniors because it is much more difficult to justify taking rights away that adults are accustomed to having. (On the up side: we could join forces with the motor vehicles agencies to kill two birds with one stone - a driving/voting test for the elderly!)

In theory, a cognitive test does not sound objectionable, but the devil is in the details. I fear abuse, mismanagement, and perhaps a slippery slope which would lead to disenfranchising other categories of adults.