The Founding Fathers set up a democracy in which most voting power was stolen from others. While all people were counted to determine the voting power of districts and states, only White men who were 21 years old and owned property were able to vote and therefore wield the voting power of everyone in that district and state.
Most of the theft of voting power has since been corrected, yet there is still one large class of citizens (22% of the population) whose voting power is taken from them and allocated to total strangers.
Who is this most disenfranchised citizenry? Children.
All people, including children, are given equal voting power. This voting power is simply taken from children (since they can’t vote in their own interests) and allocated to adults, whereas adults vote on their own behalf. That would be fine, except that children’s voting power is allocated to adults who do not necessarily represent their interests. We live in a representational democracy, and this is a miscarriage of representation that is, if anything, getting worse. To understand why this injustice both should and could be remedied, we have to take a look back at how the U.S. has been steadily correcting a lack of representation ever since its founding.
The Calculation and Distribution of Voting Power Across Time
In 1788, when the Constitution was ratified, voting rights were set by the states. For the most part, only white men who were 21 years or older and who owned property could vote. And yet, except for enslaved people who were only counted as 3/5 of a person for the sake of determining the voting power of a district or state, all other people were counted as one person for determining a district or state’s voting power. That voting power was then stolen from the vast majority of people and given to those allowed to vote.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1788 | Constitution ratified — states control who can vote |
| 1870 | 15th Amendment — bans race-based restrictions (often ignored) |
| 1920 | 19th Amendment — women gain the right to vote |
| 1965 | Voting Rights Act — federal enforcement of anti-racist protections |
| 1971 | 26th Amendment — voting age lowered to 18 |
| Today | All citizens 18+ can vote |
When the Constitution was ratified, race-based restrictions were premised upon the notion that people perceived to be black were inferior and thus not able to adequately represent their own interests. Their voting power (albeit already limited to 3/5 of a person) was taken from them and allocated to those people who were alleged to better represent their interests than they themselves would. In 1870, the U.S. corrected this injustice (though this was not entirely enforced everywhere until 1965).
Similarly, women were also counted for the purpose of allocating representational voting power, but, under the Coverture doctrine from English Common Law, a married woman was legally “covered” by her husband — a husband and wife were considered one legal person, and the husband was its representative. In 1787, the average woman married at age 21, nearly all women (likely 92%+) got married, and divorce was virtually non-existent (the divorce rate was about .3%). So, to the Founders, virtually all women were married, those married women were “covered” by their husbands, and thus the vast majority of women had their interests represented via their husbands. The injustice of stealing women’s voting power and allocating it to men was eventually corrected in 1920, and women were able to vote on their own behalf to represent their interests. Again, more direct representation equals better representation.
| Group | Could they vote? | Were they counted for representation? | Who “represented” them? |
|---|---|---|---|
| White men (property-owning) | Yes | Yes | Themselves |
| White women | No | Yes | Husbands/fathers (in theory) |
| Children | No | Yes | Parents (implicitly) |
| Enslaved Black people | No | Partially (3/5) | Slaveholders (in practice) |
Next, the Vietnam War made obvious that the voting age should be lowered: if someone is old enough to go fight and potentially die in a war, then they’re old enough to have a direct say in whether or not we go to war in the first place. Instead of taking the voting power from people 18-20 years old and allocating it to all citizens 21 years old and above, the nation decided to give those people their own voting power to represent themselves. Again, direct representation is generally preferable if we believe in the American Experiment: a representational democracy in which every person is equally counted and equally represented.
In all three instances (racial restrictions, sex restrictions, and age restrictions), the voters decided to diminish their own voting power by extending the right to vote to others who should justly be given direct representation to vote on their own behalf.
The time is past due that children, counted equal to adults as people for determining a district and state’s voting power, be given the most direct representation.
Children’s Representation
While it was always wrong to steal the voting power of children and allocate it to strangers (just like it was wrong to do so for enslaved people, women, and adults under 21), even the indirect representation of their interests is declining. In short, they are becoming increasingly disenfranchised.
In 1787, most voters (about 75%) had children. Men couldn’t vote until they were 21, so, in 1787, they could start to vote at roughly the age that they started having children. On average, families had 7 children, and life expectancy was shorter, so most of a man’s voting age life was spent being a father of children who were minors. In contrast, today men can vote at a younger age, they wait longer to get married, they have fewer children and thus have a smaller span of having minor children, and they live longer, so much less of their voting age life takes places while they have children who are minors. In contrast, when a majority of voters have minor children, the interests of those children would presumably at least be somewhat represented in the aggregate by the voters because children are the most important thing in most parents’ lives. Still, it would have been more fair for those children’s own votes to be allocated to their own parents to represent them instead of their votes being distributed to all the voters in a district/state. If a person had 7 children, their 7 children count for 7 votes, so they — not some strangers — should get to represent their children’s votes in the voting booth. As we saw with all other misrepresentations of voting power, that voting power is unjustly distributed when it is not distributed as directly as possible to the people themselves whose interests should be represented.
However, what was once a hill of injustice has grown into a mountain: today, the vast majority of voters (75%) do not have children who are minors. Thus, the representation of minor children (via voters who have minor children) has diminished. As it has, the voting power of those children is now distributed to those who not only do not represent their interests but who, entirely unintentionally, might act counter to their interests. I’ll explain more about the latter later, but first we need a better understanding of the magnitude of demographic shift.
- Slight impact: More adults are choosing to stay permanently childless.
- Very large impact: Adults are having fewer kids and living longer, so they spend much more of their adult life than before without minor children (you might assume people who have had children would be sympathetic advocates for the best interests of minor children, but, as we will see, sympathetic advocates can cause policies counter to the interests of children).
| Adult category | 1787 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Voters with minor children | ≈ 75 % | ≈ 25 % |
| Permanently childless | ≈ 7 % | ≈ 21 % |
| “Empty-nest” parents (all children ≥ 18) | ≈ 17 % | ≈ 55 % |
While it was already unjust that the voting power of children was distributed to all voters instead of to those who would most directly represent them, the injustice has grown tremendously because the voting power of minor children is now being primarily distributed to voters who do not even have minor children.
Priorities, Not Positions, Dictate Power
You might say, “Sure, those empty nesters no longer have children under the age of 18, but they are equally representing the the interests of children because they know what it’s like to have children.” But you would be wrong. Sorry. Let’s break down “representing the interests of.”
Let’s say you have two politicians of the same political party who are running to be their party’s nominee. Both want to increase funding for education and to increase Social Security payments. You might think, then, that a vote for either would equally represent the interests of children: both politicians want to increase funding for education. However, it’s not a politician’s positions that matter most. It’s their priorities. Two politicians can hold the same positions, but if Politician A champions education in their ads and Politician B champions Social Security in their ads, which one do you think a parent with minor children is more likely to vote for and which one do you think an elderly person on Social Security is more likely to vote for?
As you can see, those voters who prioritize the interests of children are those who most directly represent them.
More contentious but still worth adding: It’s very possible that at least some of the priorities of the “empty-nesters” run counter to the priorities of children if children could vote directly for their own best interests. For instance, Social Security is headed toward insolvency, and this can only be fixed by 1) Decreasing payments, and/or 2) Increasing taxes to make sure that Social Security stays fully funded. If nothing changes, children today will not get 100% of the Social Security promised to them when they retire. They will still get something, but maybe it’s 80% of what the same elderly person today gets. If children could vote on their own behalf today, they would almost certainly prioritize school funding, and they might even prioritize decreasing current Social Security payments and/or increasing taxes on current taxpayers to make sure that Social Security stays solvent for when they themselves retire. It’s not a stretch to say that children would reasonably say, “Instead of voting for the current Social Security payments to remain intact as we trod closer to insolvency, I’m going to vote that Social Security be cut to 95% of payments now, taxes be raised now, and I’ll get 95% of the Social Security due to me as well when I retire.”
This post isn’t about what could or couldn’t fix Social Security, so don’t get embroiled on that point. The point is that grandparents who care deeply about their grandkids might, without even meaning to, be voting in their own best interests instead of in the best interests of their grandchildren. And, would we blame them if they did? I certainly would not. That’s their vote. They can do with it as they please. And that’s the point: it’s their vote. The problem is that their vote holds the power of all the children’s votes in their district too, so they are actually using the voting power of those children to vote in ways that might not as fully represent or might even be contrary to the representation of those children’s interests if the children could vote in their own interests.
Magnitude of the Problem and the Fix
As we can already see from the fact that most voters do not have children and yet the votes of children are distributed to all voters, children are not being represented as well as they should be.
But let’s quantify that. Let’s take a voting district of 100,000 people and divide it according to the average demographics in the U.S.
| Population Category | Head-count | Percentage of total population |
|---|---|---|
| Children (<18 yrs.) | 22,000 | 22 % |
| Adults who have a minor child | 28,000 | 28 % |
| Adults with no minor children (those adults who do not have children but likely will, the permanently childless, and the empty nesters) | 50,000 | 50 % |
With 100,000 people in this district, the district would have the voting power of 100,000 people. However, children do not get to cast votes on their own behalf, so the 100,000 person voting power is distributed to all the voters (all the adults). Mathematically, the distribution occurs by taking the voting power of the children (22,000 votes) and dividing their votes among all the voters (78,000 voters). That quotient (22,000 divided by 78,000) is 0.28. Each voter gets an additional 0.28 votes, and thus each voter in that district gets the power of 1.28 people’s votes.
Minor children + the parents of those minor children = half of the voting power of the district. But, the voting power of the children is spread to all voters, even though twice as many of those voters do not have minor children. Thus, the children’s votes are taken from them and then primarily given to those who do not have children such that those without children end up having even more voting power to represent their own interests (in the same way that white men had vastly more power to advance their own interests when they could use the votes of people perceived to be black, of women, and of younger men).
Again, this does not make sense. We live in a representational democracy where all people are created equal and all people deserve equal representation.
The fix is to give every U.S. citizen equal representation by taking the number of dependents under the age of 18 and dividing by the number of guardians (up to two). That would determine the additional voting power of each guardian. To be clear, this would create no extra voting power that doesn’t already exist. Each child already has one vote. For instance, if there is one dependent child and two guardians, that would be 1 dependent divided by 2 guardians, which gives a quotient of 0.5 and thereby grants each guardian the ability to use 0.5 of the child’s voting power to represent the child’s interests (as opposed to current system in which their child’s voting power is given away to total strangers).
The Future and the Present
The American Experiment has succeeded beyond what anyone likely hoped. And yet, it has needed to be updated, and we have updated it. There have already been three Constitutional Amendments to fix a lack of representation based on race, sex, and age limit. But 73 million people remain unrepresented: children who are equally counted but then not equally represented because their voting power is distributed to those who are not bound to represent their interests.
This is not a question of partisanship. When our representational democracy was established, virtually all voters had young children. The opposite is now true: most adults/voters do not have children under age 18. As our country has already done in the past, we have righted our wrongs, and I believe a Constitutional Amendment that provides for the just representation of children’s voting power is inevitable. Time and time again voters have acknowledged a lack of equal representation, and they have chosen to right that wrong rather than to hold onto voting power for themselves that was taken from another person whom they do not represent.
But, until then, because we all get the voting power of the children in our districts and states, it’s up to us all to vote on their behalf with their interests prioritized as they would do so themselves if they could. Do your part and represent them in the voting booth — your vote carries more weight because part of your voting power is their voting power that you wield.
Bibliography:
Leadership Conference Education Fund. (2024, June 5). The census counts everyone. So why shouldn’t everyone count? The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/blog/the-census-counts-everyone-so-why-shouldnt-everyone-count/
Cohen, A., & Codrington III, W. U. (2020, February 3). The promise and pitfalls of the 15th Amendment over 150 years. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/promise-and-pitfalls-15th-amendment-over-150-years
United States. (1787). Constitution of the United States of America, art. I, § 2; amends. XIV & XV. https://constitution.congress.gov
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, July 6). Three-fifths Compromise. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
Allgor, C. (2012, September 4). Coverture: The word you probably don’t know but should. National Women’s History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should
Verhovek, K. (2025, March 3). The 19th Amendment, explained. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/19th-amendment-explained
The National WWII Museum. (2020, October 28). “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote”: The WWII roots of the 26th Amendment. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/voting-age-26th-amendment
Faulkner, C. (2010). The fertility revolution [Review of Revolutionary conceptions: Women, fertility, and family limitation in America, 1760-1820, by S. Klepp]. Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. https://commonplace.online/article/review-carol-faulkner/
Lane, J. M. (2021, May 6). Nineteenth-century middle-class American women: Marriage, relationships and the struggle for identity in a patriarchal society. HistoryHub. https://historyhub.info/nineteenth-century-middle-class-american-women-marriage-relationships-and-the-struggle-for-identity-in-a-patriarchal-society/
Borntreger, R. (2022, October). Surprising divorce statistics. Borntreger Law Blog. https://www.borntregerlaw.com/articles/surprising-divorce-statistics
Sachs, S. E. (2024, July 22). Give parents the vote! Reason. https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/22/give-parents-the-vote/
Guzzo, K. B., & Loo, H. (2023). Number of children to women aged 40–44, 1980–2022 (Family Profile FP-23-29). National Center for Family & Marriage Research. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/guzzo-loo-number-children-women-aged-40-44-1980-2022-fp-23-29.html
U.S. Census Bureau. (2024, November 12). Less than half of U.S. family households include children under 18 (America Counts: Stories). https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/family-households.html
Bradley, J. (2025, June 19). Social Security Trust Fund reserves could be depleted by 2034: What that means for benefits. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/social-security-trust-fund-reserves-could-be-depleted-by-2034-what-that-means-for-benefits-11757456