Voter Rolls Should Be Smaller, Not Bigger

Beege wrote about this yesterday, but I can't get it out of my head. In yet another ill-advised move, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom is extending the voting age to 16-year-olds. 

There is only one reason to do that: to skew the voting population to more ignorant, and therefore more left-leaning, constituencies. You can make all the noise you want about kids being able to get a job at 16 and thus pay taxes, but the simple fact is that children with no experience in life and who have spent almost their entire life in government-indoctrinating schools have no place in making life or death decisions for a country. 

BREAKING:

Keir Starmer announces that the UK is lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 in all UK elections. pic.twitter.com/HOAbkCJJ1R

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 17, 2025

Nobody actually believes that 16-year-olds understand anything about anything important. That's not a knock on them as people, but merely an observation that experience only comes with age, and perspective is impossible without experience. 

Voting is about self-governance, and if anybody argues that children are good at governing themselves in any way, they are gaslighting you. That's why we set things like drinking ages and limit access to tobacco by age. In the UK, for instance, you cannot purchase alcohol until you are 18, but now you will be able to have a say in the national budget. 

U.K. government: ban 15 year olds from social media because they’re not responsible…

U.K. government: give 16 year olds the vote because they’re responsible…

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE@beverleyturner @AllisonPearson @bbclaurak @UnityNewsNet https://t.co/PAH8D5DlS1 pic.twitter.com/MKqIanQw1L

— TruthSeeker73 (@13orangesbc) July 17, 2025

All this got me to thinking about the larger issue of voting in general. Liberals have been doing everything they can to get homeless people, illegal immigrants, and people with dementia into the voting pool. They have made vote harvesting a national sport, and refuse to clean the voter rolls of dead people and those who have moved out of state. 

This has nothing to do with good government, democracy, or ensuring that people have the right to exercise their franchise. It is purely about expanding their voting pool, and the less informed, the better. That person who just pooped on the sidewalk after using their government-provided syringe to inject noxious drugs into their veins has the same voice as a taxpaying citizen because the Democrats allow them to register to vote at a homeless shelter and collect the ballots when the election comes around. 

Restricting the franchise is a tricky business for obvious reasons. It gives lawmakers yet another opportunity to shape the electorate to reflect their preferences. It took the civil rights movement to ensure that blacks could exercise their right to vote, and we rightfully want to prevent that kind of abuse. 

But restrictions on the right to vote are not the only form of abuse you can see in elections. It shouldn't be controversial to say that there should be minimal standards for voting, and among those standards should be, at a minimum, reaching the age of majority. If you are young enough for your parents to ground you, it seems reasonable that you are too young to vote. 

Frankly, I don't think that homeless people should be voting. By definition, they are incapable of managing their lives, at least at the moment, so asking that they be excluded from the pool of people who manage the lives of others seems reasonable. 

What about people who get more than 30-50% of their living expenses paid for by the taxpayers over a year? Same. It's one thing to need help when unemployment strikes or in some crisis — that happens to many people during their lives and is no big deal — but quite another if someone is living off the government dime for over a year or a decade. If milking the government is your job, then you shouldn't be in the voting pool. 

This isn't about punishing people. It's about ensuring that self-government works at the societal level. If you cannot govern your own life, you shouldn't be in a position to govern others'.