Planning to fill in the Trump-Vance bubble on your ballot in November? I encourage you to take a reflective pause and envision the moment. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and imagine a society in which the person in the booth next to you could have a significantly greater voice in the election, purely because they have more children than you do.
Since former President Donald Trump chose Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate, I have been alarmed by several of Vance’s political stances. I find Vance’s support for Demeny voting — or allocating parents voting power for their underage children — to be particularly troubling. At an academic conference in 2021, Vance said, “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.” This position, I believe, poses a troubling threat to our nation’s most vulnerable constituents — and our democracy at large.
First and foremost, Vance’s proposition is inconsistent with the democratic ideals of fair voting. Simultaneously, Vance’s proposition will pressure those who don’t want children to procreate and shame those who can’t sexually reproduce. Vance is manipulating democratic ideals in the name of a domestically traditionalist America. This version of America would be particularly harmful to marginalized voters, including women, queer people and others with non-traditional family structures.
Setting a precedent in which the voices of some citizens matter more than others is unconstitutional and unfair. No one person should be able to cast multiple votes. Although parents would theoretically decide together which way each child should vote, this decision might be skewed by financial imbalances or other power discrepancies within the home.
Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny — the namesake of Demeny voting — initially argued that the system aimed to prevent the political disenfranchisement of children. However, I believe Vance has misappropriated Demeny’s idea to encourage a socially-regressive pronatalism.
Pronatalism has a dark history. In the Soviet Union, pronatalist policy was used to justify the prohibition of abortion and limitations on divorce and contraceptives. In Nazi Germany, pronatalism enabled eugenic fervor by pseudo-scientifically dictating which demographics were fit to reproduce.
Under both of these oppressive regimes, women received financial and status incentives for procreation. One such reward was the Cross of Honor for the German Mother, a medal that was publicly worn to indicate the superiority of childbearing women. Simultaneously, gay and infertile people were viewed as “defective,” a pejorative that was pseudo-scientifically justified by pronatalist ideology and reinforced through social shaming. In these societies, pronatalism laid the tracks for marginalization and discrimination.
Today, pronatalism is appropriated and politicized by movements such as Quiverfull, a Christian model that considers the large family — the “full quiver” — to be a divine goal. Such movements place an excessive domestic burden on women, who are expected to stay home and reproduce. Women are rewarded for their fertility rather than professional accomplishments. As a method of achieving higher birth rates, these movements also discourage abortion and access to contraception.
I believe Vance has conflated Demeny voting and the pronatalist agenda, threatening American women and couples that can’t biologically reproduce in the process. I see no valuable advantage to parents voting for their children by proxy. Instead, I see a strategic policy catering to specific demographics while excluding others. The policy doesn’t even address the issues it’s meant to solve — representing a larger, younger segment of the American population.
Purportedly, “parental voting rights” are intended to mitigate gerontocracy, or a state that disproportionately reflects the interests of elderly people. This is pragmatically implausible. Operating under the assumption that the vast majority of schoolchildren are not politically educated, the amplified voice is not of the youth but of middle-aged adults. When their parents are allowed to vote for them, even adolescents who are more politically informed have no legal agency of their own, and the so-called “democratic” mission of Demeny voting is once again compromised.
On the level of principle, the institution of voting should not favor certain demographics over others. If people are incentivized to bear more children so that their political interests might be more strongly considered, free will is implicated and the universal right to suffrage becomes more conditional.
So, before casting your vote, consider whether you are supporting a vision of democracy where power belongs to the people — or just to those with the most children.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
