Following up on this post in which I criticized Jonah Goldberg’s recent oped extolling the virtues of making it harder for people to vote, a blog reader writes:

If the nation is “enriched” when more people vote, why not let kids vote?
They are in school for two months prior to the national election, so kids
are probably better informed and more interested in national elections than
the local drug dealer-felon. Voting should be viewed as a privilege, one
that you may lose when you choose to commit a serious offense. Retaining
voting rights may not be much of a deterrent to a life of crime, but the
principle is sound and I’ve seen no compelling counter-argument.

Thanks for writing! The “enrichment” claim was not my defense for easy voting (the term appears in Goldberg’s characterization of Sen. Clinton’s voting bill). I talked about voting among “political equals.” In my view, the question who counts as political equals is determined mostly by the political process itself (with a backstop role for the courts, as I’ve argued in my recent book). We don’t view children as political equals, in part because, particularly for younger children, we can’t trust them to exercise sound judgment. One might extend that argument to ex-felons, as another reader of my post suggested to me. I don’t agree with the sentiment, but I understand it.
What I find indefensible about Goldberg (and those making similar arguments) is the idea that voting should be made difficult so as to weed out unintellgent voters (“uninformed louts”). I reject the idea that voting is like a test where we want only intelligent voters (informed non-louts?) to make choices for the rest of us. Presumably Goldberg would favor some kind of literacy test or other device to separate out good from bad voters. It is that sentiment I find unacceptable. At least among the universe of adult, citizen, resident, competent non-felons (and we can argue if those categories should be narrowed further), I strenuously disagree with arguments to impose further voter qualifications, particularly those based on supposed intelligence. Moreover, even if one wanted to impose an intelligence test, using a byzantine registration system hardly seems the best way to separate the intelligent from the uninformed louts.