Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It's not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.

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.

That kind of sounds like we won't need it anymore if we're developed enough to be able to implement it well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Except the candidates would all be garbage anyways haha

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.

Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?

It's almost like we've run this experiment before at massive scale in real world conditions, and that experiment yielded data.

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.

Everyone affected by the policy decisions of the land should get to vote. No matter their race, literacy or political belief

You can design the exam to the purpose, and race isn't even the only factor to worry about. Maybe they claim a voter needs to prove financial literacy with advanced questions about various investment options that aren't relevant to the lower class.

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"

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.

That's also a trap but I think the quote refers to something else.

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.

Continue to allow blank-ballot to be a legal vote (as it is today). Nobody has to vote if they don't want, and now if you're trying to do a protest-abstain it actually gets noticed.