Today’s entry in the NYU Law Democracy Project’s 100 ideas for 100 days series , by Samuel Moyn, argues for “[m]aking the votes of the younger count for more” in order to counteract the political power of older voters. Entitled Voting Our Way Out of Gerontocracy , Moyn’s essay considers giving “proxy votes” for parents to cast on behalf of their children but concludes that “parents do not have the same interests as children, not by a long shot.”

Moyn also considers giving the right to vote to children as young as six years old, but ultimately rejects that idea as well because “the underlying problem is turnout”–the elderly will still vote at greater rates than the young. (He doesn’t consider Australia-style compulsory voting as a solution to the turnout problem.) So he contemplates

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