Should Voting Be Weighted by Age to Favor Younger Generations?

As someone nearing 60, I can confidently say my generation, and older generations, have been very good at tilting the policy playing field in our favour. Our political and economic system is very good at prioritising the views of older people. So maybe it’s time to tilt the electoral system back in the other direction, in favour of younger voters.

This could be accomplished in several ways. The one most often discussed is lowering the voting age to 16. Another is something called Demeny voting, in which parents or guardians could cast votes on behalf of their children. While this would seem to favour parents rather than young people per se, it should not be forgotten that many parents of under-18s are younger people themselves, despite the rising age of motherhood in Australia.

My preferred method is to weight votes according to age: voters below, say, 30 would receive a more heavily weighted vote, voters 30 to 60 would get a less weighted vote, and those over 60 would retain their current single vote. For argument’s sake, you could multiply the vote of under-30s by 1.3 and that of 30- to 60-year-olds by 1.1. People’s ballot papers could be distinguished by colour – under-30s get blue, 30s to 60s green and oldies red – to make counting easier on election night.

How could such a blatantly discriminatory democratic system be justified? On the grounds of simple justice: policy decisions will affect younger voters for far longer than older voters, who will be alive for a much shorter period. The classic example is the climate crisis: younger voters will disproportionately bear the costs of climate change compared with older voters, who will die in the next 20 years and who are far less likely, seemingly, to care about it.

Generational justice

There’s an objection that argues that younger voters – by being alive a lot longer – will have more opportunities to change those decisions than older voters. But by the same token, older voters have in the past had opportunities to change decisions that younger voters haven’t had. That “future opportunity” argument cancels itself out. And over a long time under such a system, there would be generational justice: the first half of the century’s younger voters touting their blue ballot paper and wielding 1.3 votes will become the stressed parents of midcentury with 1.1 votes and the latter part of the century’s seniors, grumbling about having only one lousy vote.

It’s also true that many older voters are highly motivated by the fate of younger people and vote in ways that reflect that concern, rather than simply as an expression of their own material interests. What’s more, older voters can draw on a lifetime of experience to make judgments about issues in a way that younger people cannot. Fair enough, but the qualities individual voters bring to a democracy are irrelevant to the central argument about weighted voting: that exposure to the outcomes of a political process should dictate the voter’s role in shaping that process, regardless of that voter’s personal qualities.

A weighted system is also justified in terms of democracy. This is the argument detailed in 2023 by two Danish political scientists, Andreas Bengtson and Andreas Albertsen, who explored the grounds on which we value democracy and considered whether weighted voting could be justified. This will get a little wonky but it’s important: on the basis that everyone affected by a decision should have the opportunity to shape that decision, it would be equitable to give people who are differently affected different opportunities to shape it – so younger people should have a greater opportunity.

Alternatively, on the basis that everyone subject to a decision should be able to shape it (whether they are directly affected or not, they must still comply under the laws of the polity), older voters are subject to a decision for a shorter period than younger voters, who may have to live with a decision (such as, say, a referendum outcome) for decades. Either way, weighted voting can accord with our democratic values.

Just to be comprehensive, the two Andreases also explored an argument that dismisses those all-affected and all-subjected rationales for democracy and instead proceeds on the basis of the “relational egalitarian” argument: democracy is valuable because it is a necessary part of relating to one another as equals. Under that argument, weighted voting is acceptable because, even if people are necessarily equal, they can be affected to a different degree by a decision.

Weighted voting, Australian-style

But never mind your Danes, there’s another, less philosophical but more Aussie justification for weighted voting: we already have it! The allocation of MPs and senators to states and territories under our constitution has been weighted since 1901. As a result, we weight the votes of Australians differently – not depending on their age, which people can’t control, but on something entirely within their discretion: where they live.

There is one senator for every 34,300 Tasmanian voters compared with one senator for every 160,000 Canberrans and one senator for every 381,000 Victorians. The votes of Victorians in the Senate are worth less than one-10th of the votes of Tasmanians, and the votes of Canberrans are worth about one-fifth.

This weighting could be justified on the basis of the eccentric argument peculiar to federal political systems, that justice demands that smaller states (remembering that states are arbitrary historical and political creations) need to be overrepresented so their interests are not overridden by more powerful states. But – as the Eurythmics might say, here come the Danes again – once you start saying that justice or democracy require overrepresentation on the basis of which side of a border people choose to live, you must allow in the idea of overrepresentation on other, equally rational or more rational grounds – such as age and the duration of exposure to political decisions.

But it gets worse, because the weighting in Australian democracy isn’t confined to the Senate. It takes an average of 75,000 Tasmanians (and in the division of Clark in 2025, just 69,000) to elect each of the state’s five MPs. In the Northern Territory, one seat has fewer than 50,000 voters, and the other has 67,000. But in New South Wales, it takes an average of 110,000 or 120,000 voters to elect an MP. In 2025, a number of electorates in Western Australia had about 100,000 voters.

True, much of the difference between states and territories is due to population change, which the Australian Electoral Commission does its best to keep up with via regular redistributions. But there is no avoiding the fact that Australia already has a highly weighted voting system based on something as trivial as where people choose to live.

A more rational system of voting than the one we already have, which gives younger people slightly greater power than older people in shaping the political process would be the ultimate form of excluding vested interests from decision-making.

It would signal to young Australians that they are valued and trusted. It would give them greater control over the future they’ll face without us. And it would go some way to correct the persistent tilting of our political and economic system against them.