If You Needed to Pass an Exam to Vote
-
I think the qualifying questions could be attached to the ballot and submitted anonymously.
Race should not be discernable ... in theory.
Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?
-
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.
-
I think the qualifying questions could be attached to the ballot and submitted anonymously.
Race should not be discernable ... in theory.
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.
-
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
-
Not even close. And I find it racist of you to assume that a minority is somehow incapable of passing an exam.
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
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"
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
I don't have a problem with rich people choosing not to vote.
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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..
-
The problem there is the administration of the tests, not the tests themselves.
And that is a non-solvable problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everyone affected by the policy decisions of the land should get to vote. No matter their race, literacy or political belief
A check to make sure they understand exactly what they are voting for seems sensible.
-
The phrase "voting machine" is also a problem.
Only when accompanied by "paperless" or "closed source"
-
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.
-
Except the candidates would all be garbage anyways haha
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.
