What Is Voting For?

Joshua Kleinfeld* & Stephen E. Sachs**

Shared ground—much more than we’d expected when Joseph Fishkin and Nicholas Stephanopoulos first agreed to write in response to Give Parents the Vote—is the most notable feature of our exchange.¹ Fishkin and Stephanopoulos are two of the most distinguished election law scholars of our generation. They are both to the left of us politically. And our proposed reform, of letting parents vote on behalf of their minor children, is off the beaten track.

But witness the agreement. All four of us agree that the status quo is wrong as a matter of principle and of policy: children are “members of the American political community if anyone is,”² and their lack of representation leaves our political system and policies “observably and significantly distorted.”³ All four of us agree that this distortion is serious enough to warrant changing the law. Stephanopoulos further agrees with us that parent proxy voting is clearly consistent with the Constitution and other federal law, and entirely up to the states,⁴ though Fishkin sees the equal protection concerns as more significant.⁵ That’s a lot of shared ground. What’s left to disagree about?

At the surface level, we plainly disagree about policy solutions. Rather than have parents represent their children at the polls, Stephanopoulos would create a system in which all young adults’ votes count for more based on how many unrepresented children live nearby—say, in the same census block group.⁶ (For example, in an average district, Stephanopoulos would multiply the vote of every eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old by 1.7, so that existing young-adult voters “cover” the children under eighteen.⁷) Fishkin would lower the voting age to fourteen but make no further provision for those thirteen years of age or younger.⁸

Beneath these policy disagreements lie deep disagreements of principle, both about the purpose of voting and about the nature of the parent-child relationship. In our view, the chief point of universal suffrage is to protect citizens’ interests—what’s good for them, both materially and morally—as those citizens see their interests. Politics is about tradeoffs, and politicians are buffeted on all sides by demands for different policies. The hard lesson of experience is that there’s no way to secure equal consideration of all citizens’ interests while counting only some of their votes. Children are citizens too, and leaving this quarter of the citizenry without the vote means leaving their interests uncounted when it matters most.⁹ Yet since children can’t vote competently to protect their interests, their proper political representatives are their parents—to whom it falls not only to protect their children’s interests, but very often to define those interests, even when parents and children disagree.

Continue reading in the print edition . . .

© 2025 Joshua Kleinfeld & Stephen E. Sachs. Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Article in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the author, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice.

*Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law and Faculty Director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School (on leave); Deputy General Counsel, U.S. Department of Education. Upon commencing his government service, Professor Kleinfeld took no further part in the writing or editing of this Article (already scheduled for publication), which does not reflect the views of the Department.

**Antonin Scalia Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. We are grateful for the advice and comments of Joseph Fishkin, Amanda Schwoerke, and Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

1 See Joseph Fishkin, It Takes a Village . . . But Let the Teenagers Vote, 100 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1277 (2025) (responding to Joshua Kleinfeld & Stephen E. Sachs, Give Parents the Vote, 100 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1201 (2025)); Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Give Young Adults the Vote, 100 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1299 (2025) (same).

2 Kleinfeld & Sachs, supra note 1, at 1213, quoted in Stephanopoulos, supra note 1, at 1303; accord Fishkin, supra note 1, at 1290 (describing this premise as “entirely correct”).

3 Kleinfeld & Sachs, supra note 1, at 1203; see Fishkin, supra note 1, at 1290 (accepting that “children’s interests are not currently well represented”); Stephanopoulos, supra note 1, at 1302 (finding this claim “compelling”).

4 See Stephanopoulos, supra note 1, at 1322–23 (defending his own proposal as on equal footing with ours).

5 See Fishkin, supra note 1, at 1296–98.

6 See Stephanopoulos, supra note 1, at 1301, 1321. On its description as plural rather than proxy voting, see infra text accompanying note 59.

7 See Stephanopoulos, supra note 1, at 1321.

8 See Fishkin, supra note 1, at 1280, 1293–94.

9 See Kleinfeld & Sachs, supra note 1, at 1203, 1212–13.