Sen. J. D. Vance (R-OH), Trump’s 2024 running mate for now, seems to think so.
The premise of Vance’s now-infamous “childless cat ladies” jibe is that people without children shouldn’t run the country because they have no stake in its future.
Like much else Vance believes, this is nonsense, because you’re affected by public policy as long as you live. For example, should a 96-year-old have no say about privatizing or abolishing Medicare just because she’ll be dead in a couple years?
When Vance made this remark in 2021, he also proposed “that parents should be allowed to cast votes on behalf of their children.” (See article here.)
He wasn’t exactly saying children should vote; rather, he said parents should get more votes, because they have a greater stake in the country’s future. He quickly added that people who can’t have children for biological or medical reasons weren’t the “target” of this remark.
But it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t be disadvantaged by his scheme. It’s similar to the Old South wanting 3/5ths of a vote per slave, who didn’t get to vote. But let’s skip that, and consider how it would be implemented in practice.
Republicans, Vance included, are super-vigilant about preventing fraudsters from impersonating other voters, which almost never happens (see article here), except when a child uses a dead parent’s or relative’s ballot (see, e.g., story here). Voter ID laws are a solution without a problem.
How would these laws work for children? They don’t have driver’s licenses, so would parents have to take their kids to the polling place to prove they exist?
If school IDs are used, what about newborns, toddlers, and pre-school kids? They get ballots too, don’t they, so how do you get IDs for kids too young for school? From the local Republican Party office? Make them yourself?
And what about that? After all, Vance’s idea isn’t to let kids vote, it’s to give parents more votes, so the kids don’t really need IDs because they’re not voting. You’d only need to prove they exist, and you can do that by hauling around their birth certificates. But these are easy to make on a home computer, so it seems to invite voting fraud.
And then there are problems like these:
- How do you divide the children between the parents? If a family has 3 kids, and both parents vote (let’s say for different parties), which parent gets 2 extra votes, and which only 1 extra vote?
- What about divorced parents? Who gets the kids’ votes? The custodial parent, or the parent paying child support? Does this have to be written into the court-approved parenting plan? If tt’s silent, who decides?
- What if multiple parties claim a child’s vote? Who resolves this, and how?
- Who casts the ballots of orphans, children in foster care, or kids in juvenile detention?
- Doesn’t this violate the “one-person, one-vote” constitutional principle?
As to the latter, I suppose the argument would go that the parents are only casting their own votes, and merely acting in loco parentis by casting their children’s votes, so the one-person, one-vote rule is intact.
But that argument is spurious, and should be rejected, because the whole point of Vance’s scheme is giving parents greater say in running the country, not empowering children to vote.
I think the best, simplest, and fairest way to do deal with this idea is to drop it — and not vote for Vance or any ticket he’s on.