Abstract
Joshua Kleinfeld and Stephen Sachs make a significant contribution to the literature on children’s disenfranchisement by describing and defending parental proxy voting: empowering parents to vote on their children’s behalf. The authors’ democratic critique of the status quo is particularly persuasive. Children’s exclusion from the franchise indeed distorts public policies by omitting children’s preferences from the set that policymakers consider. However, Kleinfeld and Sachs’s proposal wouldn’t do enough to correct this distortion. This is because contemporary parents diverge politically from their children, holding, on average, substantially more conservative views. The proxy votes that parents cast for their children would thus often conflict with the children’s actual desires. Fortunately, there’s an alternative policy that would fix more of the bias caused by disenfranchising children: young adult proxy voting. Under this approach, children’s votes would be allocated not to their parents but rather to young adults—the cohort of adults closest in age to children. Young adults, unlike parents, are highly politically similar to children. At present, for example, both young adults and children are quite liberal. So, to revise Kleinfeld and Sachs’s thesis, if we want children to be adequately represented at the polls, we should give young adults the vote.
Recommended Citation
Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos,
Give Young Adults The Vote,
100
Notre Dame L. Rev.
1299
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol100/iss3/7