Teenagers in Belgium must vote in upcoming European elections, the country’s constitutional court has ruled - ten days before the deadline to register to vote.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/J7L6B
Adults who fail to turn up at polling stations at least four times in a 15-year period risk losing their right to vote.
This sounds like it’s made up by some teenagers. No, we’re not mad you didn’t show up. In fact, you’re not even invited!
TIL that voting in Belgium is mandatory and tbh I am somewhat intrigued by the concept.
What I do find weird on the other hand is the requirement to register to be able to vote. Or maybe I just don’t quite understand the mechanism. Here in Germany you automatically are registered to vote wherever you have registered your primary residence. So you only have to do something in advance if you want to vote by mail. The only people that do have to register somewhere are homeless people without residence on file, which is a small number.
Everything here is preregistered. You get a summons letter telling you which polling station to vote at. Usually the local school or whatnot. The summons include a specific hour so you never really spend more than 20 minutes tops, but I’ve also been in & out in under 5 minutes before.
OK so it’s more or less the same as Germany, and just the wording that threw me off.
How does the specific time slot work and what happens when you miss it and come later? That’s something we don’t have and personally I find it quite relaxing to just sleep in long (voting is on a sunday) and then casually stroll to the polling station whenever I feel like it.
In my experience if you miss your timeslot you just show up whenever and queue. It’s not as if you’re forbidden from voting for it.
I’ll take things that will never happen in the USA for a thousand!
I’m glad at least one country has lowered the voting age, but this will likely take a long time to come to the UK.
I’m amazed that Belgium thinks 16 and 17 is old enough to vote. Do they also allow 16 year olds to join the military?
I don’t get why people use ‘is allowed to get killed for our country’ as a measure of whether someone is old enough to play a part in general society, think critically, or have political opinions.
My feeling is if you’re judged old enough to vote, you’re old enough to drink, and you’re old enough to join the armed services, and be tried as an adult. If you’re not adult enough to do one of these things, why are you old enough to do the other(s)?
You’re welcome to have all the political opinions you want at any age, but voting is something that should be taken with as much seriousness as the other items on that list.
And yet the US’s (typical) drinking age is 21, opposed to voting at 18, and driving at 16. Driving likely because its necessary for any sort of mobility, and drinking because we’ve deemed that some adults are too young to drink, but are old enough to own a firearm and be recruited to the military. Its arbitrary
True. And I think all of these things should be set to the same age limit in the US.
It’s because we used to draft 18 year olds to fight in the Vietnam war and they couldn’t vote until 21 in many States at the time
If voting needs to be taken so seriously surely you should need a certain level of education before you can vote. For instance, only people with a humanities degree.
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And the penalty is not being able to vote after not voting for 15 years
I assume there’s always the option of invalidating your vote by drawing dicks on it or something. The mandate just ensures that everyone has expressed their views.
If they’re not old enough to consent they aren’t old enough to vote. Libs don’t reply.
i get your point but in belgium the legal «majorité sexuelle» (basically translates to sexual adulthood / sexual majority, it’s the equivalent of age of consent and when you are no longer considered a sexual minor) begins at 16.
but really, base it off of consent to what? where is the legal line for if you’re old enough to vote in a country? is it when you can sexually consent (16 with Romeo and Juliet exemptions within 2 years, so in some cases 14/15), or when you can pay taxes (18), or when you can do drugs (18), or more specifically alcohol (sometimes 16), or when you can own a gun (18 and must have no criminal record and must be mentally evaluated), or when you can be elected to parliament (21), or when you can gamble (21), or when you can fly an airplane (16), or when you can drive a car (18)? i don’t get why the age of consent is your specific threshold, especially considering you having sex has little to do with your ability to make an informed decision while voting and get political representation. if anything it would make a lot more sense to base it off of something like civil majority (18) imo.
