16 years olds are pretty impressionable. I know I was. Wouldn't this kind of change make them more vulnerable to election manipulation?

Sounds good. I'm interested in why you think your vote doesn't matter in IRV? And what system you'd replace it with

the UK region of Scotland

I've never felt this offended

That's already how it works. You never have to register to vote; you can spend you're entire life opting out of the electoral system.

But when you register to vote you've accepted your civic duty to cast your vote everytime. So 16-year-olds would just have the option of starting earlier.

I've gone back and forth on this. I definitely think they should have the option to vote, but I'm not sure whether it should be compulsory or not.

The main problem I have with making it purely optional is that if you didn't, that could create a sort of smaller-scale American-style campaign where the goal isn't to make the best case, but to make your campaign about encouraging your supporters to vote and discouraging those who disagree from voting. Obviously they'd only be doing that for 16 & 17 year-olds, but that could potentially still be a problem. I don't want politicians to have any more incentive than they already do to run shitty negative inflammatory campaigns.

Another potential problem is around voter education. People are really dumb. So many people already have problems understanding how our voting system works. We want to send out a message that's as simple as possible. "Everyone has to vote" is a much simpler message than "16 & 17 year-olds can vote if they want, people aged 18+ must vote."

We do trust 16 year olds to begin learning to drive though.

I would be completely open to the idea that at 16 you have the right and option to vote, but voting is not compulsory until you turn 18.

That way 16 year olds who aren't interested or ready or comfortable placing a vote don't have to, but those that are already politically active, interested and informed about voting can do so.

Across the whole there really isn't that much developmental difference between 16 and 18, there's a pretty big cross over between the more "responsible" 16 year olds and the "irresponsible" 18 year olds. I know that's not really an argument, but the fact is that many 16 year olds are just as informed, and just as responsible as the rest of the voting public.

Many 16 year olds work and pay taxes, they study in an education system managed by the department, they can begin joining the army, they might be looking at university and signing on for HECS debt before they turn 18 depending on their birth month. These are systems built on policies by parties that these young people had no say in, and it directly effects them.

you don't trust this person to give sexual consent

Umm, age of consent in at least most of Australia (I only checked the 3 most populous states, and all of them matched) is 16.

From what I've seen of adults, I have no reason to believe the average adult is any more aware or any less susceptible to lies than 16 year-olds.

I trust politically interested 16-year-olds more than I do politically apathetic septuagenarians.

Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn't take long. It's on a weekend so it's not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There's a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had compulsory voting so there's no denying it's valuable.