Sure, go ahead and lower the voting age

The latest stir in Malta’s ever-active, yet largely demotivating political scene has been caused by none other than Joseph Muscat’s opinion piece on The Times last week, when he declared himself in favour of reducing the voting age to 16 years (initially for local council elections).

I do not dislike the idea. Rather, I was aghast by people (like one member of KSJC – Kunsill Student Junior College) who argued that giving the vote to 16-year-olds was tantamount to giving an extra vote to their parents.

I cannot agree that people who vote like their parents do simply because they are sixteen years old. There are many reasons why you might choose to vote like your parents – maybe you are over-loyal to your family, maybe you feel like your family owes a particular politician, or you are unable to decide for yourself and let people you trust decide for you. Or maybe you simply agree with your parents. If you vote like your parents when you are sixteen, chances are you will vote like your parents when you are eighteen, and thirty, and sixty.

When I was sixteen I was pretty bad at articulating my thoughts so I avoided political arguments, but just because I did not speak my mind did not mean that I did not have a mind of my own and that I would not use it in the mighty polling booth.

Lowering the voting age can be a way of balancing the effect of an aging population on the outcome of elections. Too many people still vote for a party because of what it was in the 60s or the 70s. Labour legalized homosexuality in the seventies, but if I was a homosexual now I wouldn’t be voting for Labour because Labour in 2008 has no papers on gay rights. The more people there are who can vote for a party because of what it is instead of what it was, the better.

Yet I must admit that, wonderful and forward-thinking as this discussion is, I can hardly be expected to get excited by it, considering the much bigger issues in our electoral system which are not receiving any attention. If a sixteen-year-old cannot vote this year, by the next election he will be given the right to vote and his vote will be as important as the vote of an 80-year-old grandmother who has twelve children and 50 grandchildren. In contrast, all the citizens who believe in not voting for MLP or PN will never be given the right to a vote that matters, because of the different measures the electoral system imposes on other parties. Wouldn’t we be better off proposing ideas to solve these problems?

So while I think that yes, lowering the voting age makes for an interesting discussion, until we fix the bigger issues in our democracy Dr Muscat’s idea will continue striking me as just a pretty cloud in the sky.

Lara Vassallo is a second year Medicine Student and is incoming editor of www.insite.org.mt. This blog was produced by Insite – The Student Media Organisation. www.insite.org.mt