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Yeah it sounds fun unless you have any awareness of how this actually worked out when it was used in the past. Fully not okay.
You mean tests that were designed to ensure that only “the right people” were able to pass them. As well as a grandfather clause that exempted all of those right people (in modern times there would likely be a voter roll purge that would somehow lose most liberal voters while miraculously keeping all of the conservative ones).
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.
Still trying to figure out what happened in the second frame.
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
Except the candidates would all be garbage anyways haha
Hahaha both sides, am I right. Ahahahahh
Shut the he fuck up and actually vote in primaries and we will have better candidates.
I vote in all the primaries you shut the fuck up you don’t know who you are talking to dude
The options in the primaries usually suck too or the people in power push out the ones the people actually like.
Candidates being all garbage is exactly what you’d expect when they’re just pawns for the people actually running the government (i.e. owners of big corporations).
Since they’re shit, they’re not popular and can’t achieve much on their own. When they’re not useful anymore they can be blamed and replaced by the next puppet.
Of course they’re also shit, exactly because they’re in the pocket of the very wealthy. In the US it seems even impossible to gain any significant position without their blessing.
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.
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.
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.
Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?
Who determines the questions and answers? Now they are the ones determining who can vote and thus the people in control.
Still a better system than your electoral college.
This is what happened when the US did it before. https://lemmy.world/comment/18458771
And because of how fractured and fucked our political positions are, something like it would happen again. We need a lot more happening before even a proper and fair test could be made.
No. Its just another tool used to be racist and reduce minority votes.
We dont have to guess or assume. It already happened and thats what it was for.
Its not a better system. If you want to pretend though… you can at most say its the same.
Not even close. And I find it racist of you to assume that a minority is somehow incapable of passing an exam.
The white guy test: spell dog.
The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
See the problem yet?
No in the past black people here in America weren’t allowed to be educated or learn to read. When they gained voting rights none of them knew how to read well so the racist made a law saying you have to pass a reading test or some shit so they couldn’t vote.
You can’t just look at the current situation and make rules based on that you have to look at it wholeistically. Not being able to read doesn’t mean you are stupid. There are lots of reasons someone might fail a test but still be intelligent enough to vote and make a good informed choice.
And I find it racist of you to assume that a minority is somehow incapable of passing an exam.
I’m begging you to please read this Wikipedia article. 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.
Other countries, notably Australia, as part of its White Australia policy, and South Africa adopted literacy tests either to exclude certain racialized groups from voting or to prevent them from immigrating to the country.
Video showing one of the actual tests from the Jim Crow era. https://youtu.be/6lor3sfk-BE
The problem is barriers to entry. There are certain things like voting that should have bare minimum entry requirements. (Proof of ID, lack of felony charges) Because once you put in any requirement (like education level etc.) those requirements can be manipulated by bad actors. We already have low voter turnout in the US as it is, and people already try to challenge that in bad faith (looking at all the “stolen election” bs in 2021).
Putting requirements like education is just begging people to manipulate it and skew results (harder tests in some areas, obtuse questions, general “elitist” focused motivations)
The point is voting needs to be accessible to everyone, even if some of those people are “not smart enough” then we need to focus on educating those people, not stopping them from voting because of some arbitrary “good enough” line.
There are certain things like voting that should have bare minimum entry requirements. (Proof of ID, lack of felony charges)
IMO, felony charges are another tool of deliberate voter disenfranchisement, since the US justice system is clearly racist and has a shit ton of convictions compared to the EU (most countries, really - the US prison population per capita is one of the highest in the world). Lack of felony charges should probably be a requirement for being elected, but at this point they might start trying to use it for this, too.
I agree. I would actually like to see a 100% voter turnout from within prisons. Not only should we not strip that right, but it should be available for citizens while incarcerated as well. Seems easy to do.
You obviously don’t know the history of voting tests. In the US, tests were designed to be virtually impossible for anyone to pass, but white voters didn’t have to take them, because the rule was you didn’t have to take the test if your grandparents could vote. They were implemented in a racist way.
You want to trust the government to design and implement tests, that sort of thing is what it could easily lead to, whether you want it or not.
Yes I’m well aware of Jim Crowe laws. Before you can enact something fair you’re first going to burn down everything you have currently.
The systems you have right now are a dead end, and there is no way to manage or change that system from the outside. So first it must be destroyed.
Troll
Extremely close, because it’s happened before.
Literacy tests at the polls were used as a tool to keep black people from voting, often by handing them different, harder tests.
Then don’t do that.
Give everyone, and I mean everyone, a standard fifth grade test. It would not surprise me one bit if the highest failure rate of such a test comes from the large swath of redneck nitwits there exist over in America.
Who writes the test?
Who determines the test is at a fifth grade level?
Who will proctor the test?
Where will the test be administered?
When will the test be administered?
Who decides what a passing grade is?
Who grades the test?
Who verifies the grade on the test?
At every step there is an easy way to disenfranchise whatever people you don’t like. For instance: simply make the test only available at noon on the Monday before election. Make it only able to be taken at town hall. Immediately, anyone who works an hourly job will no be effectively disqualified from voting because they can’t take the test.
Now make the exam only available in English. Anyone who cannot speak English is now disqualified.
There are so many ways for literacy tests to go wrong, they’re pretty much only good for excluding people you don’t like from voting. Just let everyone vote and make it a mandatory holiday.
It’s almost like we’ve run this experiment before at massive scale in real world conditions, and that experiment yielded data.
It’s not working. We have relatively equal education in Germany, and we have plenty of intelligent, educated people voting far right.
“Educated” does not equal intelligent, and it certainly does not imply broad intelligence. You can train a relatively stupid human being to do all kinds of stuff and if you’ve ever worked with people with degrees you know what little value they carry.
I went to college and have white collar career and my family is largely university educated. I worked with structural engineers at my last job and half them were just barely able to do their jobs with the worst ones being the senior people. Elsewhere in the world there have been anti-vax doctors and nurses, psychotic therapists, and theologians who have read the bible who still do all the horrible things they definitely know are bullshit. I bet nearly half the people here on Lemmy know a software developer or three who shouldn’t ever touch a computer. People with degrees are more likely to be more intelligent but, especially while living in a world where they’re basically expected, that’s really just not a guarantee.
Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It’s not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.
We have govs and gobs and gobs of research that show that the best forward for everyone is cooperation. In fact, a lot of that research explicitly shows that the least ethical approaches are often the worst ones by nearly every metric except for “gives a handful of the wrong people way too much power”.
It’s like the four day work week and how we know it’s better not only for employee happiness but also for productivity and talent retention. We know that paying people fairly means that people can actually afford to buy the products we sell. We know that GDP is a bad measure of economic strength and that the most robust economies are those where a lot of smaller amounts change hands frequently. We as a species know all this, and anyone I would consider intelligent would have picked up on these patterns even if they weren’t explicitly told but they ARE being told, over and over again.
We need a new measure of what intelligence is but anything qualitative instead of quantitative is incredibly difficult for most people to grasp and they end worshipping the worst people who have stuff regardless of how they got it. I have the same diploma as my classmates and most of them shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near building design; pointing out my ability to graduate from a program even they could graduate from is not worth that much.
Intelligent people are not omniscient or universally unbiased. Just because they’re capable of doing a difficult job well, speak eloquently or excel in IQ tests doesn’t mean they won’t fall for political fallacies, aren’t xenophobic etc…
Being good at your little task, and in this case we’re talking about degrees so it’s just passing a couple courses and schmoozing your boss afterward, does not make you intelligent. I know some profoundly stupid people who barely scrape by, many by just overworking themselves because they lack the ability to grow and learn new, better ways to do things on their own.
The bar for “intelligent” is on the fucking floor, apparently.
Yup. Same in the States.
People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.
Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn’t guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they’re clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.
Arguably the educated and intelligent are more likely to profit from fascism (to an extent), anyway - they’re going to do the oppressing, while most workers are going to be on the ‘being oppressed’ side.
Are they very educated then?
They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.
Keep trying, Jay. One day you’ll make a funny comic.
Voting should be mandatory, punished by like a $200 fine for non voters.
I don’t know about a fine, but it should be more effort to not vote than to vote. That way the people who are determined not to vote still have an out that doesn’t involve violence.
Brazil does this I think & it’s not going well
Yes, let’s force everyone to vote whether or not they have any clue what’s going on or who the candidates are, great idea.
Thanks, i also think it’s a great idea to force people to be involved in the processes that control their lives.
And that’s what makes you a tyrant.
Waaa oh no the big bads are gonna make me be politically active so i vote in my own self interests and the interests of my community.
The horror
It works in Australia. The main upside is since voting is mandatory the onus is on the government (or more precisely, an independent body called the Australian Electoral Commission) to make sure there are enough polling places, voting papers etc to accommodate the full turn out. Further, voting is done on a Saturday and there is plenty of opportunity to vote early/do a postal vote/vote from a completely different electorate etc.
My understanding from several US elections I’ve seen is there are a LOT of people who would like to vote but can’t due to work, ridiculous waiting times, lack of facilities etc. Compulsory voting would mean all of this would have to be taken care of without the states mucking around with their own rules.
To address the issue you have, yes, people who have no clue turn up and vote BUT whilst voting is compulsory, submitting a valid vote is not. So long as you turn up and take your bits of paper you can just draw a dick on them or whatever if you don’t feel you know enough to have a say.
ridiculous waiting times, lack of facilities etc.
This is a big part of the GOP’s strategy for maintaining power in a “democracy” despite not having the support of anywhere near a majority of the general public. Wherever possible, they ensure that voting in Democratic areas is as difficult as they can make it. In some places they’ve even made it illegal just to hand out water to people waiting in line to vote.
I’d love to know how many people either draw a dick, or vote for the legalised cannabis party or whatever.
You can (and should) provide fair access to voting without making it mandatory. Most people would probably submit a valid vote anyway, there’s a lot of no/low information voters already and refusing to vote, for example to boycott the election or for whatever other reason is also a valid political stance. Plus I’m not a fan of any financial penalties because they’re basically an extra civil rights subscription for the wealthy who can afford to pay the fines, while a poor person who doesn’t make it to the polling booth gets disproportionately screwed.
There is a general rejection of such a test. Obviously voting in its current form doesn’t work. If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?
If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?
With you being the judge of what is the “quality of the outcome”? That isn’t democratic.
Right, who could make that judgement? And everybody voting under the influence of propaganda is also not democratic.
So what is the moral thing to do?
Make it more accessible and provide better candidates.
Accessible things like:
- nearly anything other than first past the post
- Mandated Paid time off to vote.
- Vote by mail(universal absentee ballot).
- Strict adherence to vote outcomes (Congress cannot ignore at state nor national level).
- full-stop limits on campaign spending
- reform campaign donation regulation
- limit campaign advertising to small window near election (e.g. 3 months prior)
Better candidates like:
- Anyone left of “defacing property is equivalent to or worse than assault on a person”
- One that has a platform people are excited to vote for
I promise you there’s plenty of highly educated idiots, such a test would only limit the voting base to elite idiots.
An education system that doesn’t aim to turn the population into diligent cattle.
If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to voted. I think if everyone was guaranteed free access to both a high school and college education, along with all food and living costs covered for anyone studying, then I could see having at least any associates level degree being an okay barrier of entry to voting.
However, such a thing would need to be protected by some unremovable barriers. For instance, education would need to continue receiving appropriate funding, food and other living costs such as renting a room would need to be covered even as the cost for these things are variable. People with disabilities would need to receive proper accommodations.
There’d need to be a massive overhaul of the education system. Most people who do graduate still make stupid-ase, self-sabotaging choices.
Oh for sure, there are a lot of different areas in education that need to be changed. We need to go back to teaching people how to think rather than prepping them to just memorize for the test. That’s not even mentioning the issue that AI can have on the learning processes.
the main function of the contemporary media: to convey the message that even if you’re clever enough to have figured out that it’s all a cynical power game, the rest of America is a ridiculous pack of sheep.
This is the trap.
-David Graeber, The Democracy Project
You mean most people know better?
How could society signal to themselves that they know?
No, it’s more saying that media outlets convince people that they (the viewer) are the ones in the right, they are the ones in the know, and everyone else is dumb essentially.
That’s also a trap but I think the quote refers to something else.
Possibly, but I would need more context for a better interpretation than the conclusion I came to.
