Part of the issue is that you haven't shown the 30 year old to be competent when s/he stood for the first election. (Now I think of it, you haven't shown a 70 y

Part of the issue is that you haven't shown the 30 year old to be competent when s/he stood for the first election. (Now I think of it, you haven't shown a 70 year old to be incompetent, but that's another issue.) If you have rules that are not based in competency, but on a simple feeling you have that group of people X, are not competent to do job Y. That's just not going to go well for you. Age minimums as conceived by the founders, for instance, were based in competence. A desire for people to have experience. Even then, they were not draconian. As evidenced by the fact that someone 35 years old could be President of the US. If you were arguing in favor of competency testing, people might get behind you. But you're arguing in favor of a blanket ban. Which is another matter entirely.