The City of Albany, California will be voting on several local measures that appeal to progressive hearts but may have consequences that are not at all progressive. Along with Measure R which, as has been pointed out elsewhere, could result in the already steep cost of Albany senior housing rising even further, there is Albany Measure V.
Measure V would extend to minors of age 16 the right to vote for Albany School Board as well as for Albany City Council and local ballot measures. As proponents point out, the City of Berkeley allows minors to vote for members of the School Board. My understanding is that in Berkeley, however, the right to vote is restricted to School Board elections and does not extend to Berkeley City Council or ballot measures. It is this difference that should cause Albany’s Measure V to fail.
The arguments made for Measure V focus on cognition and the ability of minors of age 16 to make good decisions. The argument to extend voting rights to lower ages also cites democratic principles that teach us that voting is good, and voting once leads to voting again. But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t have a lot of time to take on this post and would rather be writing the last part of the series on knob-and-tube wiring and how mobbers leverage it to put us out of our homes. But it needs to be said that the right to vote should not be based on cognition alone. KQED has posted no arguments against Measure V but there are arguments to be made (https://www.kqed.org/voterguide/alameda/measures).
Voting rights cannot be considered apart from the age of majority, a legal concept that marks the time when a person “assumes legal control over their person, actions, and decisions, thus terminating the control and legal responsibilities of their parents or guardian over them” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority). When we reach the age of majority, we also become responsible for the choices we make under the law. This means that minor children are not responsible for the votes they might cast in the same way that adults over the age of majority might be.
You could argue that the age of majority varies so greatly as to be arbitrary, even from American state to state. But there is something here that is not so easily calculated, and that is experience in the world.
There is a strong relationship between majority rights, like voting in democratic elections, and experience in the world—autonomy. The importance of experience in the world to the decisions we make as voters is irrefutable, even when housing is so expensive that young adults often remain at home.
I would argue that a good vote is not just any vote; it is a vote informed by the experience of living in the world. This is why we laugh at politicians who have no idea of the cost of a bag of groceries. A good vote is, hopefully, a vote cast with the kind of understanding that comes with sharing the same burden of responsibility that those affected by your vote shoulder. For this reason, emancipated minors should be empowered to vote. But minors who live at home with their parents are not autonomous under the law, and studies show that children tend to inherit the political views of their parents. This could mean elections that are swayed toward the interests of households with greater numbers of children. Indeed, some of Albany’s ballot measures seem to be designed to attain some end that is not politic to articulate.
With block coordinators and police officers who join speculators in strategies of exclusion intended to increase city revenues and put legal residents out of their homes while touting the test scores of students at Albany High School, Albany seems to have adopted the privileged attitudes of a gated community. In Albany, the gate is money.
Test scores are but one measure of a high school; test scores are not the measure of a person or a community. As a woman whose housing and other civil and human rights continue to be attacked in Albany, California, a woman who has been forced to endure harassment and attacks in Albany, California that we do not permit in prisons, and as a woman who continues to be battered in her home by members of multiple families on multiple sides in Albany, California, I think it would be unwise to grant anything more than the right to vote in School Board elections to children who are not emancipated minors in Albany, California.
