You mean like how the house and senate are the ones who actually vote on the laws instead of direct democracy?

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.

Voting should be mandatory, punished by like a $200 fine for non voters.

Keep trying, Jay. One day you'll make a funny comic.

You sure do love calling people fascist, you've done it multiple times today.

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.

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.

That's a perfect example of its ambiguousness; I read that as "the number below [this question]" and assumed I had to cross out enough zeros to make it 1,000,000.

Yeah, but the actual answer is how white are you?

You realize that literacy tests were used to exclude minorities from voting, right? The idea is not fine because it's inherently oppressive.

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.

Nope, it's a terrible idea.

Who defines 'service'? Who assigns 'service'? Who decides you have done enough 'service'? Who decides who is capable or not capable of 'service'? What happens when two different officials have different ideas on the above? What happens when different administrative regions have different ideas on the above? What happens when different regions have different numbers of Voters? What are the health risks of 'service'? What the health risks of the jobs that aren't 'service'? What about people who are incapable of doing 'service'? What about people who choose not to do 'service'? How are resources distributed between Voters and Non-Voters? What about political issues that largely only affect Non-Voters? What happens when the Non-Voters vastly outnumber the Voters and rightfully decide this is a crappy system?

I suggest the game Shadowrun if you want a look at a world where the Certified Citizens are a small minority. It's not pretty.

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.

Please explain

Compared to rest of questions, the one doesn't specify that the answer is contained in the sentence, By that logic, I'd say the first word is Louisiana.

Brazil does this I think & it's not going well

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.

This test is clearly intended to be deceptive. For example, with Q1 should I circle the number '1' or 'a'? With Q4 how do you draw a line around something? 11 is clearly a trick question designed to put pressure on people.

I'm autistic and whilst I could confidently argue an answer for these questions, I'm pretty sure someone would disagree with the reasoning I use, and a single failure means I fail the test

Just people like you, for some reason.

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.