A year before J.D. Vance was elected to the Senate, he advocated for a novel way to enhance the political strength of families — by giving parents the ability to cast tens of millions of additional votes on behalf of their children.
Vance, now the Republican nominee for vice president, in a 2021 speech called for encouraging Americans to have more babies and allowing them to more fully advocate for their children.
“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” he told the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
Such a voting system would almost surely face legal challenges, experts in election law said. It would also create logistical hurdles. Election officials would need to track which voters were eligible to cast multiple ballots and regularly update their voter rolls to account for moves, divorces and court decisions in child custody cases.
Vance appears unlikely to push for the idea if he’s elected to the White House alongside GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Vance has not written legislation on the issue since he was elected to the Senate in 2022. Vance spokesman William Martin called his 2021 proposal “nothing more than a thought experiment on strengthening parents’ rights and not a concrete policy proposal.”
Trump has spent years baselessly calling into doubt mail-in ballots and other parts of the country’s elections system. A Trump spokesman did not say whether he supported Vance’s idea of letting parents cast additional votes for their children.
Vance, the best-selling author of the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” made his 2021 remarks a few weeks after he launched his Senate bid. In his 35-minute speech, Vance argued the right had lost control of all the nation’s cultural institutions and needed to encourage families to have more children to avert a “civilizational crisis” and reinvigorate the economy. He criticized the media, including The Washington Post, and lauded Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s policy of giving newly married couples loans that are forgiven if they stay together and have children.
Vance derided many Democratic leaders for not having children — including Vice President Harris, who has two stepchildren and is now the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee.
“What is the one thing that unites every single one of them?” Vance said of Harris and three other Democratic leaders. “Not a single one of them has any children. Now why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have any children?”
The next day, at another event, Vance said the left had built “an entire political movement that is explicitly anti-child and anti-family.”
Harris spokesman Ammar Moussa accused Vance of engaging in “ugly, personal attacks.” “Unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance, Vice President Harris understands that every single American has a stake in this country’s future,” Moussa said. In response, Vance’s campaign released a statement from Vance’s aunt Lori Meibers that called criticism of him “disgusting.”
The idea Vance floated was fleshed out this month in a law review article titled “Give Parents the Vote” by Northwestern University law professor Joshua Kleinfeld and Harvard law professor Stephen Sachs. Giving parents the chance to vote on behalf of their children would “profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians,” they wrote.
Vance has not reviewed the article, according to his campaign, and he has not publicly gone into the level of detail that the authors do.
There are more than 70 million children in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, and they account for nearly a quarter of the population. They have major stakes in climate change, the size of the federal government’s debt and long-term policies, Kleinfeld and Sachs wrote. They wrote that allowing parents to vote for children has to be taken seriously even if it sounds like a “silly provocation” at first.
Under their plan, single parents would get to cast ballots on behalf of their children. Two parents who had shared custody would each effectively cast half a vote for each child. That way, a child’s ballot would be cast even if the parents disagreed on whom to vote for. That part of the plan would complicate the work of election officials, who would be responsible for keeping track of the “fractional votes” cast on behalf of children.
Kleinfeld and Sachs downplayed the potential for fraud, saying election officials could establish systems to identify suspicious activity like ones the Internal Revenue Service uses to find people who falsely claim dependents on their tax returns. In response to questions, Sachs in an email called the logistical considerations of their proposal “a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one.”
Allowing parents to cast votes for children is in line with giving them the power to make educational and medical decisions on their behalf, the pair wrote in their law review article.
Which party would benefit from allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children is unclear, they wrote.
“As to policy, while both parties will surely assemble new coalitions around issues of interest to parents, it’s hard to know what those issues will be,” they wrote, predicting politicians would start to push for “more child tax credits, more focus on school quality, more emphasis on public safety, more environmental protection, and more concern with long-term financial risk.”
In his 2021 speech, Vance didn’t delve into the details of his proposal, such as what to do when parents disagree on how to cast a child’s ballot or whether to allow someone to vote on behalf of orphans who are wards of the state. He also did not address whether noncitizens who are barred from voting would be allowed to cast ballots on behalf of their children who were born in the United States and have citizenship. (Vance recently signed on to legislation meant to prevent granting birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants who are in the county illegally.)
Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky, said he was intrigued by allowing parents to vote for children but questioned whether it would pass muster in court.
“My guess is that a court would more likely strike it down as violating the idea of equal representation because it’s one person getting more technical votes,” he said. “Even though they’re voting almost as a proxy for their children, they’re getting more votes than someone who doesn’t have kids.”
Edward Foley, an election law professor at Ohio State University, agreed such a system would face a tough road in court.
He expressed doubts about the merit of the proposal. Democracy is built on the idea that all voters get an equal say and are responsible for thinking about what’s best for the entire community, not just themselves, he said.
“I applaud the idea of making sure that our political system is well designed to think about the interests of kids,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean giving extra votes to parents. It means everybody as a voter should be thinking about all the interests that are worthy of protection.”
