20h ago

If You Needed to Pass an Exam to Vote

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This should be mandatory. Cannot have mouth breathers vote for far right because they don't like the colour of their neighbours' skin.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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!

172 comments