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Fuck no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States. Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race. Illiterate whites were often permitted to vote without taking these literacy tests because of grandfather clauses written into legislation.
The problem there is the administration of the tests, not the tests themselves.
And that is a non-solvable problem.
We just need to make sure the voting machines are not racist. Solvable, if we’re starting from scratch.
The phrase “voting machine” is also a problem.
Only when accompanied by “paperless” or “closed source”
Nope. It’ll never work. Because when I walk into the voting booth, how do I KNOW FOR A VERIFIABLE FACT that this machine here in the booth with me is running the published software?
Computerized voting will always be a mistake.
The machine produces a physical paper record you can read, it doesn’t matter what software it’s running if you can verify your vote is accurate.
you think the current racist rich people wouldn’t be racist and rich if we introduced an exam to the voting process?
I think the qualifying questions could be attached to the ballot and submitted anonymously.
Race should not be discernable … in theory.
Everyone affected by the policy decisions of the land should get to vote. No matter their race, literacy or political belief
Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not. This is too big of a decision to leave up to disinterested and ill informed voters. I don’t care if you are left or right. blue or red.
If you don’t know the basics of how our government works you do not deserve to have a say. If you do not know the basics of what is happening in the country, then you do not deserve to vote.
ANYONE voting should be informed.
How we test for this? i have no idea. There can not be a simple education requirement or literacy test. There are plenty of uneducated people that are very up to date and informed on current politics. There are plenty of very educated people that don’t care about what’s going on and just vote by party.
But just because you have the right to an opinion does not mean your ignorant opinion is worth anything.
Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not.
Jesus. You’re literally arguing for removing franchise from the majority of citizens. If they primarily reside in an area and will be affected by the policies, they should be able to vote on them, whether or not they’re ignorant.
The problem is that you can very, very quickly arrive at the conclusion that if someone just had enough knowledge, they’d vote like me, and strip the vote from everyone that doesn’t agree with you. Except that people can, and do, have different beliefs, even with the same knowledge.
A check to make sure they understand exactly what they are voting for seems sensible.
Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?
The tests never explicitly directly measured race nor required the voters name. They can design the tests to discriminate all sorts of ways based on the content.
This is true. Whoever decides the questions and determines the correct answer holds a lot of power.
Ah yes, blamed the disenfranchised voters for not wanting to jump through another hoop. Its a big club, and, sorry, pal; even if you fill out the test, you ain’t in it.
They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.
And the approved voters just happened to be from the 50 people who controlled the testing.
InB4 the Non-Voters just start doing the Wilmington Massacre repeatedly.
Check your history books about what happens when the majority of the population has no political voice. Things get ugly.
Nah, the exams wouldn’t be mandatory for everyone. You have a degree? Exempt. You graduated from one of the “certified” high schools (the ones in white neighborhoods but we don’t call it that wink wink)? Exempt. Passed NRA shooting license exam? Exempt.
This should be mandatory. Cannot have mouth breathers vote for far right because they don’t like the colour of their neighbours’ skin.
The trouble is that barriers to voting will always be manipulated by the people in charge to exclude specific people. In the case of the USA, they are used by far right mouth breathers to exclude their neighbors on the basis of the color of their skin.
We see it with ID laws already, but imagine if the Republicans could write exam questions to select who is patriotic enough to vote. They would include questions like “Name the Confederate hero who selflessly defended his state from Northern aggression” or “Which Nascar team has the fastest pit time?” or “Under penalty of perjury, write down the names of all the illegal immigrants you know of residing in your community.”
That’s why literacy tests for voting were ruled unconstitutional.
The trouble is that barriers to voting will always be manipulated by the people in charge to exclude specific people.
That’s just a statement and not necessarily true just because you say so.
Anyway, such a test would obviously not be about Nascar or illegal immigrants, but rather the structure of the government and the content of the constitution, testing whether the testee understands their nation, its values, and the democratic principles it is founded on. I don’t buy the pseudo killer argument that the test would eventually and automatically be corrupted. Keep it on the subject matter, and as long as the constitution doesn’t change, the test doesn’t change meaningfully. Everything outside these topics is irrelevant to the test.
This isn’t a hypothetical. We had literacy tests in the USA and they were designed to discriminate against minorities and newly freed slaves. And we have current politicians in power passing ID requirements with the explicit intention of preventing minorities, immigrants, and people of lower socioeconomic status from voting.
My examples were hyperbolic, but the underlying phenomenon already happens every single day. How many districts are gereymandered? How many polling places have been closed to limit voting in specific areas? Disenfranchisement is already part of the battle, and we the people are not winning it at the moment.
First question on the test: “What is the most important American value?”
Oh! Oh! I know this one!
Telling someone else they’re doing freedom wrong!
This was basically the first Jim Crow law to stop black people from voting. I would love a more informed voting pool but this would 100% immediately be used to disenfranchise specific groups.
Just make the questions difficult for specific groups to know on average, or fill it full of trick questions with bad faith answers.
Perhaps the exam should have included a section on the history of civil rights and voting suppression in the United States.
Ah, yes: if you acknowledge it existed, you fail and can’t vote.
That’s what you had in mind, right? 'Cause that’s what would happen.
No, what I had in mind was an ironic response to someone who didn’t know his history, which would have told him why the whole idea of a “voting exam” was a bad one.
Yeah obviously this could happen but I think a good idea would be every couple years or each election you do the test about the currently held election. Like something about policies and what the people are campaigning for. If you don’t know what the hell is going on in politics at least a little you don’t deserve the vote. Maybe dven make the bar to pass like 30%. Just don’t let people vote if the only reason they came to vote is because someone said they will make it so less brown people are around
https://lemmy.world/comment/18452766
Check this out.
Yeah I have seen what one of those tests look like before
And you still think a test like that, applied to all, would be a good idea?
I never said tests should be like that.
Voting zones shouldn’t be gerrymandered, but they are. Any system that relies solely on humans not acting immorally in their self interest is naive in its conception and doomed to fail. Literacy tests are another example.
In the US anyway, its historically been those very people that have tried things like education requirements or tests for a person to be allowed to vote, specifically to create an excuse to deny anyone that wasnt white.
Yes I did watch a vid about those tests lately. The issue there was that whites did not have to take them. If everyone has to take tests and they are designed sanely that should not be an issue.
is it realistic for them to be designed sanely tho, and remain so even if they were? Remember, the people making such a “you must pass test to vote” law would be the politicians people are voting for, so they would have a huge incentive to mess with the process in such a way as to make it easier for the demographics that tend to vote for them and harder for the ones that dont. Adding an additional time hurdle like a test also has effects regardless of the likelihood of passing it, for example, it makes retirees with more free time to even do the test be more likely to qualify than someone too tired after working long hours to bother.
I mean yeah for the US I really cannot see anything like this working. That country and their democracy is just too far fucked. But making it like a 5 question little quiz before the voting would not really affect much imo.
I do see where concern would come from.
They did take them, and then were passed when their test was checked because the answers are specifically ambiguous, made to be able to fail or pass anyone at the discretion of the testing authority.
The history of our country has shown that so long as people are involved, corruption can occur. There is no test that can be written so sanely that only “the right people” pass.
The founding fathers basically solved this issue through the electoral college, you’re not supposed to be voting for the president, you’re supposed to be voting for the people who will elect the president. But that’s all gone to shit, proving Hamilton’s warnings about populism extremely prescient.
Even if it worked as intended, it just kicks the problem back a step
This is a bad idea. You would just be creating another layer of gerrymandering.
I won’t call out of or the drawer for bad idea. The idea is fine. There’s just zero ways to ever implement it. It’s nice to dream though
You realize that literacy tests were used to exclude minorities from voting, right? The idea is not fine because it’s inherently oppressive.
Yes holy shit Jesus fuck yes I know this. Read again the second part where I said that there’s no way to do this in reality.
Uhh, no the idea is most certainly not “fine”
It’s only fine if you don’t think about it at all beyond the surface level presentation.
The concept that only the educated should vote is essentially the entire advantage of living in a republic. If the test was actually fairly made it would be fine, the real problem is it would be used to limit specific demographics from voting while not actually ensuring only the educated can vote
Considering I’m against the concept of living in hierarchical government structures, such as republics, that’s not exactly a benefit from my perspective. It just exposes the flaws of living under hierarchy.
Ehh… I think it’s fundamentally problematic. Why should only a subset of the adult population be allowed to vote on laws that affect everyone?
You mean like how the house and senate are the ones who actually vote on the laws instead of direct democracy?
If there were a practical way to do it, a way to ensure that only those who were well informed on a topic could have a say in it wouldn’t be an issue. The only barrier to voting would be your desire to inform yourself.
Unfortunately there isn’t, because just about every word in the above sentences can be twisted by someone with illintent.
The concept isn’t fundamentally flawed, it’s just blocked by insurmountable obstacles.Thank you for getting what I was trying to say. Spot on, I don’t think the idea is wrong. It would be nice if there was a test to say “hey are you able to vote on these topics, have you researched, are you voting with your brain or with emotions?” - which is why I say the idea is fine. There isn’t though. There isn’t a single way to do that fairly or equitably.
Thank god the commenters immediately jumped down my throat to tell me what I already knew.
Exactly. The problem with having to meet certain criteria for being able to vote is who gets to set that criteria. We would end up with “black people have to guess the number of bubbles in this bar of soap” all over again.
In most places, citizens below a certain age can’t vote, yet laws affect them as well. By extension, one could probably argue that some people “don’t know what’s best for them” and experts/educated people are better suited to make the laws.
(However, creating such a test would obviously be impossible in practice, and would result in a conflict of interest, leading to discrimination, as muusemuuse points out.)
No it’s not.
Please explain
You’re really in a good mood today, aren’t you?
I don’t think they understand why this would be a terrible idea and are just hung up on the fact they want it and we don’t have it.
I mean… I don’t see the comic portraying the idea as good. More just using it as a vehicle to call most people dumb.
Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase, it would take all but five seconds for X party to cheat their exams, kind of like the “grandfather law” which essentially bypassed jim crow era literacy tests for everyone who was white.
Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase
“Educated” is already doing some heavy lifting. What education are you demanding voters possess?
Because I’ve had an earful about “Marxist Professors corrupting our youth!” for my entire life. I doubt conservatives would consider any kind of liberal exam a legitimate test of voting aptitude.
Meanwhile, there’s enough jingoism and nationalism in our education system already, such that I could see an exam question “Which religious extremist sect was responsible for 9/11? Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists” or “Is an individual with XY chromosomes a man or a woman?” that’s a bit… loaded? Especially when administered right before a national election.
If voting needed an exam, they would use that exam to stop certain demographics from voting. And no, I’m not talking about the ignorant.
Surely there are no examples in American history that voting eligibility exams were used to stop certain demographics from voting.
They used to do this and it turned out exactly how you describe. I would probably also add it’d incentivize politicians to dismantle educational institutions serving certain demographics
Ironically illiterate take
Maybe the author was aware of it being a bad idea but didn’t really emphasize that only an exclusive group would pick our leaders.
Judging from the rest of this author’s work, I highly doubt they thought about this any deeper than a puddle.
Okay buddy cryptofash rhetoric
whoosh
Said the guy who just said “Maybe the author created pro-fascist propaganda he doesn’t actually agree with on accident.”
To further clear things up, I’m referring to your personal and extensive posting history of fascist or fascist-leanimg rhetoric.
Not that I doubt you consider yourself an enlightened centrist.
Lol, I bet you’re some kind of Tankie or a Trump supporter.
Fascinating leap of logic. Anarchist btw.
Didn’t deny it, I notice. Weird how your kind can never quite bring themselves to do that.
If you’re anarchist then why do you get so mad when I insult your glorious dictatorship?
You’re the only person here taking a defensive stance for authoritarians, your claims don’t hold enough water to bother poking holes in.
You sure do love calling people fascist, you’ve done it multiple times today.
Just people like you, for some reason.
This is a bit reminiscent of Trump’s “everything I don’t like is fake news” routine.
This is probably in part a meritocracy, though how the government defines ‘merit’ is probably quite subjective.
Humans are all too human. A purely statistical vote such as proportional representation is most likely the most scientific method regardless of what government is elected. If a civilisation must fall through its own vices and fallacy (oh hey, we’ve been there before!), then let’s allow the collective consciousness of our fellow human beings work it out.
Ever…so…fucking…slowly.
Brazil had something like that in the early republic days, only literate people could vote. Needless to say, only the robber baron elites kept getting elected, also thanks to the significant amount of fraud that happened. “The election is won during the counting”
Good point, maybe the idea works better in theory than practice. Haha
Still trying to figure out what happened in the second frame.
