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Citizen Infrastructure

Deliberation as enfranchisement

It’s easy to assume modern democracies have reached maximum suffrage — that everyone who should have a vote has one. They haven’t. Electoral democracy still excludes whole groups: children, who are too young to vote, and — in most countries — non-citizen residents, who live, work, pay taxes, and raise families somewhere without any ballot to cast there.

Where assemblies change the maths

Section titled “Where assemblies change the maths”

Citizens’ assemblies select their members by lot from residents, not from the narrower roll of registered voters. That’s a quietly radical difference: it means children and non-citizens can serve on them — and do. So deliberative democracy can hand real agency to exactly the people the ballot box leaves out, on the decisions that shape their lives.

The provocative question

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As assemblies grow more empowered (see binding or advisory?), they raise a live question: could they expand who has a genuine say — and even help pave the way to lowering the voting age? Including 16- and 17-year-olds in assemblies where they can’t yet vote is already prompting exactly that conversation. Deliberation, in other words, might enfranchise people before the formal franchise catches up — letting a society practise sharing power more widely before it writes the change into law.

This is one of the most far-reaching implications of children & young people’s assemblies, and it rests on the logic of sortition.

Sources

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