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!
Mandatory but if you don’t it’s not?
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.
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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.
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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.
And the penalty is not being able to vote after not voting for 15 years
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.