The collapse of the Democrats in 2024 has caused a backlash against “gerontocracy.” Joe Biden eventually stepped aside, but the “cover-up” of his age-related frailty is being blamed for playing into the right-wing presidency and all its outrages. Even though one or two other elderly stalwarts of the party are announcing retirements  — Jerrold Nadler most recently, explaining that he will not stand for election after learning last year’s lesson — other politicians are staying, no matter their decrepitude and decline.

The gerontocracy debate is promising. But it has also been miscast from the start. Deeper than the scandal of aging politicians is that of an aging electorate.

Just like there is a racial turnout gap in American elections that liberals rightly consider a black mark on our democracy, there is an age-related one. There is no doubt that the older you are, the likelier you are to vote, sometimes to an astonishing extent. (I provide the receipts in a forthcoming book.) Just like in the racialized case, the age skew in the electorate is unjust. In certain instances, in fact, the age gap is worse than the racial one. Even so, it is far less likely to raise liberal and progressive concern. But saving #OurDemocracy may turn out to depend on rescuing it from elder dominance.

It is not just that it is unfair on its face. It creates a self-reinforcing dynamic. A government that fails to represent you — descriptively or substantively or both — is likely to alienate you. And since people generally want to vote for politicians their own age, the effect is a vicious cycle. You stay home, and the politicians and policies that result give you even more reason to do so. As the pop singer John Mayer asks in his song “Waiting on the World to Change,” why attempt improvements if the young don’t have enough power to achieve them, in the face of what is visibly and truly a government of, by, and for the old?

There are various minor fixes to entertain. Progressives have championed some for years, such as relaxing residency rules for registration — with their differential effects on the more mobile young — or giving people the day off work to vote that the younger set may need more than the older, especially retirees.

But only major fixes are likely to do the trick. Recently the ruling Labour party in the United Kingdom announced it would lower the voting age to 16 in the next general election. Outdoing his countrymen, English political theorist David Runciman has recommended letting anyone who can signal preferences show up, starting at perhaps age 6. In California, Maryland, and Vermont, some municipalities have lowered the voting age for mayor and school board, a policy change that the cause group Vote16USA pursues state-by-state.

If the underlying problem is turnout, though, such changes — which still sound great — won’t correct the imbalance. What we may need to save the future from the old is some combination of proxy and weighted voting that amplifies the political voice of the non-old.

Proxy voting is currently in bad odor because it is associated with the natalist right, which blithely assumes that the proxies ought to be parents, representing the interests of growing families. Famously (or notoriously), J.D. Vance supported such a policy long before becoming vice president, though its intellectual roots are older. But if our problem is gerontocracy, proxy voting can help solve it if the proxies are those most likely to represent minors, rather than their own (since parents do not have the same interests as children, not by a long shot). That is why we could experiment with letting the cohort of eligible voters nearest in age to the disenfranchised vote for themselves, as well as for their younger peers.

Of course, we could also let such eligible voters have greater voting power to serve as proxies for the eligible but non-voting members of their own generation. After all, electoral gerontocracy is equally if not more problematic for overweighting the interests of the wrinkled relative to the eligible rest, not just excluded children alone. Making the votes of the younger count for more doesn’t have to be regarded as proxy voting — only if it helps explain or justify it. Regardless, it looks better than policies that would have the same effect, diluting the voting power of the old.

There is no constitutional barrier to any of these policies. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment just provides a ceiling of 18 years of age for allowable disenfranchisement, setting no floor: the states can extend the vote below 18 if they choose. More controversially, the Amendment’s promise that the right to vote shall not be abridged “on account of age” begs the question of whether weighting voting is abridging anyone’s vote, or restoring balance to a skewed representative system.