“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
COMMENT | The discourse surrounding the Pakatan Harapan regime's agenda of lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 revolves around the silly notion that it takes “maturity” to mark a ballot paper.
A long time ago when I was still serving in the state security apparatus, a young man asked me what I thought of the possibility of 18-year-olds voting. My answer remains the same now as it was then. If you ask a young person to defend and kill for his or her country, then the young person has a right to determine who is asking him or her to do the killing.
Proponents of lowering the voting age, who argue that 18-year-olds are “mature” enough to make a decision on who runs the country, should also concede that these same teenagers are not mature to make that decision.
Meanwhile, proponents of maintaining the status quo have to concede that their definitional ideas of “maturity” mean bupkus in the face of successive regimes that 'mature' Malaysians have voted for and which has taken this country from a nascent Asian Tiger to a kleptocratic enabling Asian pussycat
This is all rather silly, considering in democracies, especially two-party democracies, what is prevalent is a Manichean impulse to correct whatever wrongs a voter thinks are destroying his or her country through the ballot box...