The “entente de l’Espoir” has proposed to lower the voting age from 18 down to 16 and have pledged to include it in their manifesto for the next general election. With little overt resistance from government and the other opposition Labour Party, the question now is : does the idea make sense?

The proposal

The political grouping comprising of the MMM, PMSD along with Roshi Bhadain’ reform Party and and Nando Bodha have proposed to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 and promised to include it in their manifesto for the next general election. Thus far, the proposal seems to have garnered little resistance from the other party in the parliamentary opposition, the Labour Party, nor from the government led by the MSM. The idea of bringing down the voting age to 16, of course, is not all that new. “It’s a reasonable proposal,” Lindsay Collen of Lalit tells l’express, “this was an idea that was first brought up by Rama Valayden”. That is, during the heyday of Valayden’s MR party back in the late 1990s. Collen, who backs the move, argues that it’s only logical to extend the franchise to 16-year-olds, “if someone can enter into a work contract at 16, then they should be able to have a voice in the National Assembly which decides on how that contract can be drawn up”. Mauritian labour laws allow 16-year-olds to enter the workplace, albeit subject to certain conditions.

Another reason the proposal is coming up is because climate activism amongst young people has once again brought up this question around the world. “Right now, the argument is that young people are grappling with questions around the environment, climate change and species collapse, and young people have been risking a lot to fight this issue out in the streets,” argues Collen. In recent years, a number of different countries have moved to allow 16-year olds to vote including Brazil, Ecuador, Austria, Cuba, Malta, Nicaragua, Argentina and territories like Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Scotland. Similar debates have taken place in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and the US.

On the face of it, extending the franchise to 16-year olds seems to be in tune with the history of progressively extending the franchise in Mauritius. In 1885, voting was allowed for the first time in Mauritius, but the high educational and property qualifications required meant that only a tiny minority – 1.5 percent of the population at the time – could actually vote. In 1947, the franchise was extended to anyone over 21 who could pass a simple literacy test (reading, writing and signing one’s name). After independence in 1975, the franchise was extended yet again, this time to anyone aged 18 and above. Which is still the case today.

Turnout

The question now becomes to what extent the arguments for extending the franchise to 16-year olds can apply to Mauritian democracy. One argument is that allowing teenagers in the voting booth will help counter plunging turnout rates across democracies globally. This, for example, was one of the reasons Austria allowed its 16-year olds to vote as from 2007, and was followed later on by Malta.

Many see the merits of this argument when applied to Mauritius. “The generation of school children that became politically active during the school strikes in 1975 demanding lowering of the voting age, decolonizing education and making a place for Kreol in the education system went on to lead to a whole new generation of politicians,” says Collen, “the problem is that the new generation of politicians that has come after them did not have this history or this formative experience; so don’t seem to be as impressive by comparison”. In other words, getting people politically active early means greater engagement politically later on in life. It’s an idea that Dr Roukaya Kasenally, democracy scholar at the University of Mauritius, agrees with: “In principle, this is not a bad idea. It gets younger people engaged in issues and conscious, however, this needs to be supported by a system of voter and civic education.”

What Kasenally is proposing is quite close to what the Green Party in New Zealand proposed in 2007, to lower the voting age to 16 in tandem with a state-funded programme of civic education. While extending the franchise to increasingly younger voters might help in getting them more aware of politics and – as some studies conducted elsewhere found – lead to greater participation in elections. In Mauritius, however, turnout is just not that much of a problem. According to figures from the Electoral Commissioner’s Office, turnout at Mauritian elections has hardly dipped from 79.4% in the 1995 election to 77% in the one in 2019. In any case, turnout at Mauritian elections remains well above the average of 66% turnout in electoral democracies across the globe, according to a 2016 study by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

Rebalancing the electorate

The other argument that can be made is that lowering the age of voting, and bringing more young people into the electorate, would help in rebalancing the generational problem now cropping up in Mauritian politics. Demography is what drives Mauritian elections across ethnic and generational lines. Following the second world war, the British authorities in Mauritius embarked on a massive campaign to eradicate malaria. This coupled with efforts starting in 1940 to expand educational and health services to the poor resulted in death rates in adults falling from 28 in every 1,000 people in 1936 to 12 in every 1,000 in 1956, higher birth rates (38/1,000 in 1945 to 50/1,000 by 1950) and lower infant mortality – plunging from 128 out of every 1,000 to just 12 out of every 1,000 by 1958.

What this means is that by the 1970s, a population boom meant more young people, with politics revolving around winning them over and around the question of jobs. Today, with crashing birth rates and an ageing population, the pendulum has swung completely the other way (Statistics Mauritius projects that by 2050, the elderly could make up as much as 30% of the population). Consequently, politics now is about elderly voters and nowhere is this more evident that when it comes to the question of the state pension. This became obvious after 2004 when an MMM-MSM government tried introducing a means-test for the state pension. Anybody getting more than Rs 23,000 from other sources after retirement would not get the pension. Out of 110,000 pensioners at the time, only 4,000 were kicked off the pension list, with the opposition Labour and PMSD parties hammering the MMM-MSM over their reform.

After that episode, all parties knew not to get on the wrong side of elderly voters: despite promising to raise the retirement age from 60 to 65 in 2006, the Labour-PMSD government did nothing. And during the 2014 election, the MSM-PMSDML bloc promised to raise an already unsustainable pension to Rs 5,000. By the time the 2019 election rolled around, all parties were basically attempting to outbid one another to woo the elderly – the fastest growing electoral demographic in the country – the MSM promised to raise the pension to Rs9,000 (promising a future hike to Rs13,500), the Labour Party promised to raise it to Rs10,000, despite giving a nod to younger voters by promising Rs5,000 to unemployed youth between 18 and 25 years of age; the MMM too followed suit by promising Rs9,000. “This was quite prominent during the last elections where all parties were basically focused on the elderly, while ignoring younger people and their priorities as lack of jobs or access to opportunities,” argues Kasenally.

One reason to include more young voters on the electoral rolls might be to help rebalance the focus of political parties. “This might be something at the back of people’s minds,” says Collen. So, the question now becomes, to what extent will including 16-year old voters help re-balance the priorities of mainstream electoral politics? Turns out, not very. Had this measure been passed in 2018 ahead of the 2019 election, what difference would this have made? According to Statistics Mauritius, in 2018, there were 39,222 16- & 17-year-olds in the country. Had they been added to the 941,719 registered electors for the 2019 elections (assuming that all the newly-added 16 and 17 year olds registered to vote) they would have made up just 3.9% of voters scattered over the country.

With the dynamic of an ageing population, these younger voters would actually become less of a factor in future elections. The government projects that in 2023 there would be 33,913 16- & 17-year olds in the country (or 3.4% of the electorate) and 24,466 by 2038, or 2.5% of the electorate. Hardly the stuff to swing elections, and in 2019, the 39,222 16-17-year olds would hardly have mattered in front of the 232,935 pensioners that parties were wooing. “Just lowering the voting age to 16 is not going to miraculously change this dynamic,” warns Kasenally, “with Mauritius ageing, younger voters will make up a smaller proportion of electors anyways, the only way forward is for political parties themselves to consciously come up with a more inclusive programme that takes all age groups on board.”

The contradiction

There seems to be a contradiction, however, in how old 16 is really? Take one example, recently, the government passed the Children’s Act that raised the minimum legal age of marriage from 16 to 18. Actually, it was a re-instatement of the minimum marriage age: The Code Napoleon that long prevailed over marriage law in Mauritius set the minimum age of marriage at 14 years old; however, in 1981, this was raised to 18. Then it was lowered to 16 in 1984, before the Children’s Act has now put it back at 18 years. There is a contradiction here: 16 is old enough to decide which political party and set of policies to sup- port at a national election, but not old enough to decide who to marry. Collen disagrees that this is a contradiction: “Raising the age of marriage was not about the ability or not to decide on marriage, but the inability at the age of 16 to resist being pressured into a forced marriage.”

But the incongruity does not stop there. 16-year olds face a series of restrictions based on the assumption of their inability to make decisions the way adults can: government regulations ban the sale of tobacco to a child, which is legally defined as “any person under the age of 18”. Similarly, anybody under 18 cannot enter a casino or gamble. In fact, the legal system makes a clear demarcation in practice between 18-year olds, when one is considered an adult, and those younger. “You can be held criminally responsible and prosecuted as from the age of 14,” explains lawyer Sanjay Bhuckory, “but since there is no separate Juvenile Court in Mauritius yet, you stand trial before magistrates in normal courts.” In practice, however, for those under 18, the legal system does recognize that they are not yet adults, “if you are under 18 there will be a prosecution but this will be held away from the public in a closed courtroom, you can be assisted by your parents and the court will be quite accommodating for under-18s standing trial,” Bhuckory argues, “and if found guilty, anybody under 18 will be sent to correctional youth centres or given community service orders, they cannot be sent to normal prisons for those 18 and above because the legal assumption within the legal system is that anybody under 18 cannot be made to mix with adult prisoners in normal prisons. So, while the legal system may classify anybody between 16 and 18 as a young adult, all the same they are protected as not full adults yet. This question is thus very tricky.”

With the legal system not recognizing those under-18 as full adults in practice, and with the government imposing a number of restrictions on activities normally allowed to adults but denied to 16-year olds on the assumption that they cannot make choices as adults above 18 can, it’s a strange leap to say that they will be able to decide on national policy and choose political parties.

Indeed, should the capacity of 16-year olds to choose and cut through complex national debates be recognised at election time, it will be hard to deny this ability when it comes to criminal cases or tobacco counters at shops. “I am open to the concept of allowing 16-year olds to start voting at the local, municipal or village level to start with,” says Bhuckory – echoing the past proposal by the MMM, and that countries like Estonia (allowing 16-year olds to vote at local, not national, elections) do “but everything will have to be aligned and you will have to answer the question: either you are an adult at 16 or you are not”.