I'm glad it was a misunderstanding.

I think my central point still holds, so I'll develop on it a bit more.
Every era has its challenges, and they're all seemingly insurmountable and possibly the worst thing yet. They're less significant from our perspective, but we have the benefit of history. We know how the story progressed.
FDR did have nuclear war looming, they just only knew that meant "bad", but not the details. It was probably scarier then. We know now that he actually didn't because the German program was doomed to failure from the start, but they didn't at the time. They had an economy that was in tatters, a massive food shortage resulting in poorly quantified starvation, the most powerful militaries on the planet conquering Europe and Asia, and so on.
We're past the age where the president is likely to be able to inspire unity of purpose like they did then, but that's always been how you get people to care: someone needs to convince them, or you pay them. In a time if turmoil, you can inspire a lot of purpose by giving people a stable job, and then constantly extolling the virtues of the purpose they're working towards.

All that to say, we don't know the future. You are living through the dawn of a new age. Our problems aren't insurmountable, we just don't know how to do it yet. The details are different, but it's not a new circumstance.
I'm not an advocate for apathy, but... If it does go wrong, what actually happens? America collapses, war, people die, and turmoil. We can't know the timeline, and we have 3/4 of those now with the remaining being pretty intangible. The fall of the Roman empire, depending on which fall you're looking at, took 300 to a 1000 years. To the people living through the fall, it wasn't even visible. The final fall ushered in the Renaissance, both a period of great development, but also pessimism born out of the proceeding centuries of turmoil (European peace shattered by 200 years of war, famine, several plagues, and an ice age). Injecting masses of fleeing scholars from Constantinople into that propelled things to new heights as their knowledge from the fallen empire blended with the local knowledge.
We don't know if the empire is falling, how long it's going to take, if we're at the beginning or the end, or if we're even in the empire. We don't know if the collapse will trigger a dark age (not actually dark, just "not roman"), or a golden age as waves of American scientists, artists, writers, mathematicians and engineers take their work to China and unintentionally create a fresh blend of perspectives and shared knowledge that builds on both. (Stereotypes aside we have a lot of those).

People problems are ultimately solvable by people, inevitably by talking.
History consistently tells us that it's weird, messy, and long. Live life, be kind. If someone says to do something for other people for moral reasons, it's a coin toss if they're doing something history will look kindly upon. If someone says to do something for group identity, they're probably fine. If they say to do something to someone else for group identity, they're most likely not. If someone is saying something you've heard before but a lot of people are listening and the people in power don't like it, thiniare probably shifting. Maybe not for the people speaking, but shifting.

It's late and I'm rambling as I fall asleep. When I say "you don't", I mean that history and society are too much to bend in a deliberate way. Best you can do is the right thing at the time as best you can and not worry too much about your role in the big picture. So few people have a role that sets them at the bend of those forces.

Also, I'm not too worried about LLMs and social media, fundamentally. People have been saying and believing bizarre shit forever, they just made it easier and faster. The fading lustre of the Internet is just a drift back a bit towards before it, when people just believed stuff and then no one ever corrected them.

This was my first hold up. I think the correct answer is to print the test onto a substrate that can be molded into a sphere. Then you can draw a geodesic around the number.

Every single candidate should be made to pass a basic grade 8 biology exam.

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.

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.

I certainly trust The Party That's In Charge At Any Given Time to subjectively come up with the criteria that objectively determines a voter's ignorance level

I can help! So the first step is to be white, and then the second step is to do whatever you think seems right

Idunno I thought the burning coal one was kinda funny

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.

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.

Not correct. Literacy tests weren't testing actual reading ability and comprehension; they were explicitly intended to deny the right to vote. White people would be passed because they had grandparents that had been permitted to vote, and literally got grandfathered in. Non-white people would be given tests written in, for instance, latin. So even if they could read, the odds were very poor that they'd be able to read the language the test was in. Or they would be given tests that had very ambiguous questions, and any way they answered could be considered 'wrong'.

Computerized voting will always be a mistake.

disagrees in brazilian voting machine noises

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.

Can you also verify that the vote it presents to be counted? Can you verify the counting? For every way to verify computerized voting, there are a dozen ways to compromise it.

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).

The white guy test: spell dog.

The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

See the problem yet?

Thanks, i also think it's a great idea to force people to be involved in the processes that control their lives.

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.

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.

Sure, keep believing that "truly intelligent" people are immune to fascism. There's no way that will ever come back to bite you!

They do hand-counts when there's an irregularity.

Hand count consists of 1 delegate from each party tallying every single ballet. If they disagree on a ballet (this is less common if a computer prints the ballet), an official agreed on by both parties determines what the voter intended.

The voting system is quite good by international standards, the fix in American "democracy" comes in way before all of this.