Too old to vote?

Gordon Campbell at Werewolf writes:

If the yet to fully mature brain of the average 16 or 17 year old really did justify withholding the vote until 18, then arguably….the same exclusionary logic should apply at the other end of the age spectrum as well. Yet there is no groundswell for excluding people from voting on cognitive grounds, as their brain function begin to decay. …

None of this directly addresses the question of senile dementia – and here, Barrett offers some sobering statistics. “ A person over 80 has a 20 % likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. It is estimated that by 2050, some 147,000 New Zealanders of a projected population of 4.6 million will suffer from dementia (mostly Alzheimer’s.) ” That is almost the double the projection of 75,000 similar sufferers in 2026, and 3.5 times the 41,000 (in a population of 4.3 million) in 2008.

That marks a significant shift, to numbers that could be politically decisive.

I think this is already a significant issue.

Early research indicates that at the last election, 4.067107% of voters were affected by senile dementia.