Voter at 16: Can early rights reshape elections and outcomes?

Who is an adult? What’s the right age at which someone should be allowed to vote? Or have sex – a question in the headlines. There are enough differences among adolescents that there probably isn’t a single number in response to these. There is, however, a well-understood principle that it would be best if the process of growing up into adulthood is phased in some way, beginning with education and support and ending with autonomy.

Sharp differences in law between someone who is 17 years and a few months old and someone who has just turned 18 appear arbitrary. And that is tolerated under the premise that while it is difficult to be certain about the right cut-off, there nonetheless needs to be some cut-off. No one is arguing that 14-year-olds should be treated like adults.

With a phased approach, we can have different thresholds for adult-like actions and consequences. Perhaps juvenile offenders would be better off in reform homes rather than locked up alongside hardened older criminals. Perhaps young people can begin to drive earlier if they are accompanied by an instructor or someone with a permanent driving license. And so on.

What about voting? It seems odd that an 18-year-old can vote to indirectly select the Prime Minister of the country, but someone who is a few days short of that cutoff can’t even elect their local corporator. At the other end of the spectrum, it seems odd that a 90-year-old can vote for a future that she may not live in, and even bequeath that future to a 17-year-old who isn’t given that choice. Would Brexit have passed in Britain if fewer older people had voted and more younger ones had?

Perhaps the British now think that’s a good question to ask. Keir Starmer and the Labour Party had promised in their manifesto that the national voting age would be lowered to 16 – Scotland and Wales already have that for their devolved elections. In the next general election, an additional 1.5 million young people will be eligible to vote. There are other things in the works, such as automatic registration in the voter roll.

There are good reasons for India to consider such things. Allowing people to vote at 16 to choose their municipal corporator or panchayat member might get them started in participating in electoral democracy at a local level before being given the right to choose representatives to state Assemblies and Parliament.

Similarly, automatically registering everyone who is in school, or has some identification as a teenager, can vastly increase voter registration and consequently, participation in voting. At present, about 80% of adults are registered to vote, about 65% of them show up to vote – a lot less for local polls – and the winner is typically elected with 40% of the vote in a first-past-the-post system. In short, only about 15-20% of citizens typically cast their votes favouring the winner.

During hearings this week, judges in the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission of India to design its roll-revision process to ensure mass inclusion, and not mass exclusion. It remains to be seen if the ECI bothers to heed this – it has already once rejected the Court’s suggestions.

The principle that people should be helped to register and vote is widely accepted, but in practice, it is hostage to bureaucratic procedures, indifference among eligible citizens, and political gaming to selectively admit some people and exclude others. The result, to paraphrase a popular recent quote, is that rather than voters choosing the governments they want, we might see governments choosing the voters they want.

Some of these changes could even be carried out by states. Local polls are considered an administrative matter for the states, which gives them a lot of latitude in reforming elections to urban councils and the panchayats. They could easily carry out registration drives in places where young people gather, using documents already widely accepted by institutions.

It’s common to hear people say that India’s governance is similar to the one that the British have – the so-called Westminster model. There are similarities, of course, but there are also important differences. Our MPs cannot vote freely, for example, thanks to the anti-defection law, which oddly hasn’t reduced defections one bit! Britain has also introduced regional mayors and councils in large metropolitan areas, recognising the importance of actions at that scale. And during the EU era, elections to the European Parliament were conducted using proportionate representation instead of first-past-the-post.

Among the greatest rights a democracy can confer on its people is the right to re-imagine government and its working repeatedly. We should reimagine the right to vote in ways that bring a lot more people into the process of choosing how they are governed.