Sen. JD Vance has been under fire this week after the GOP vice-presidential nominee’s three-year-old comments about the “childless left” and promoting family formation resurfaced in the media.

Among the most controversial? The claim that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their underage kids.

“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” said Vance in a 2021 talk hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids.”

At the time, Vance described his proposal as an attempt to overcome a “structural democratic disadvantage” to pursuing pro-family policies in America. 

But media reactions have framed the proposal as an attempt to disenfranchise childless people. Some have criticized Vance for saying that those without kids are relatively less committed to the country’s future.

“This is such a heinous notion that it’s hard to believe a politician would even think this to himself, let alone say it out loud,” said BuzzFeed’s Morgan Sloss, who describes herself as “intentionally childfree.” 

In the wake of the backlash, Vance’s office has tried to downplay the VP contender and Catholic convert’s 2021 comments, telling The Washington Post that they were “nothing more than a thought experiment on strengthening parents’ rights and not a concrete policy proposal.”

But the idea of parents casting votes on behalf of their kids isn’t new. Nor is it uniquely attached to Vance or his brand of right-wing populism. 

The concept is called “Demeny voting,” named for the Hungarian demographer and economist who began popularizing it in 1986 as a way to address the needs of future generations and declining fertility rates. Advocates have pursued it, albeit unsuccessfully, in both Japan and Germany in recent decades. And in the U.S., the Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat expressed support for the idea back in 2018, quipping that “the hand that steers the minivan should be the hand that rules the world.”

And while Vance isn’t currently pushing for parental voting to become a reality, other prominent figures in the American legal system are.

That includes two top U.S. legal scholars, who published a 64-page article on the subject in Notre Dame Law Review on July 18, the week before Vance’s 2021 comments resurfaced.

Entitled “Give Parents the Vote,” the article contends that parents voting as proxies for their kids could help overcome a pattern of future generations’ interests being devalued in public policy, “from failing schools to the aftershocks of COVID shutdowns to national debt to climate change.”

“This proposal would be pragmatically feasible, constitutionally permissible, and breathtakingly significant,” wrote Joshua Kleinfeld of Northwestern University and Stephen Sachs of Harvard Law School. “Perhaps no single intervention would, at a stroke, more profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians.”

The legal scholars contend that their proposal is less about giving parents more votes and more about addressing the injustice that the interests of children, who make up nearly a quarter of American citizens, “go proportionally underrepresented in politics,” even while children are used to determine a state’s electoral vote count and seats in Congress.

“It is a fact of nature that children aren’t ready to defend their own interests,” wrote Kleinfeld and Sachs, whose proposal also applies to citizens with severe mental disabilities. “Yet the overwhelming majority of these children have parents who are also citizens, who have the right to vote, and who legally represent their children in virtually every other circumstance. Why accept the assumption that these parents can vote only for themselves?”

Kleinfeld and Sachs, who are both Jewish, acknowledge that this assumption is so deeply rooted that their proposal may “seem like a silly provocation rather than a serious policy proposal.” But they contend that other proposals made in U.S. history to significantly alter voting norms, like the women’s suffrage movement, initially faced similar resistance. 

And rather than giving parents “extra votes,” the two contend that by coming up with a way for children to be represented at the ballot box, their proposal actually “restores the otherwise broken promise of ‘one person, one vote.’”

In their article, which Sachs summarized in a piece for Reason magazine, the legal scholars encourage implementation of “parent proxy voting” at the state level. They even discuss the “mechanics” involved, such as the possible use of “fractional voting” when, for instance, two parents are voting on behalf of three kids (the parents would get “one-and-a-half proxy votes each, so that five total votes are cast by a family of five”). 

Derek Muller, a U.S. election law expert at Notre Dame Law School, described the proposal as “a great thought experiment but very different than our tradition of voting,” especially with recent shifts in discussions around voting eligibility that emphasize capability. 

Muller also described the potential mechanics of parental proxy voting as “very messy” and noted that he knew of no jurisdiction in the U.S. that has implemented the method.

Nonetheless, he said that the proposal was an attempt to address the long-standing challenge in electoral law about how to translate “generational differences with different time horizons” into voting. And although he hesitated to say the parental-proxy voting movement is “gaining steam,” Muller said that getting people talking about an idea is a necessary first step for any voting-reform effort, as it was for the women suffrage moment.

“It starts with people talking about it and floating it out there and getting people to accept it,” he told the Register.

That’s the hope of Kleinfeld and Sachs, with Sachs telling the Register that the article’s publication just before the topic was thrust into the spotlight of American political discourse was “wholly fortuitous.”

He also acknowledged that the practical difficulties of implementing the proposal are real, “but not overwhelming.” 

He added: “And if states want their children to be represented fairly, they have to do something about it, not just sit on their hands.”