If You Needed to Pass an Exam to Vote

Still trying to figure out what happened in the second frame.

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"

Fuck no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

Between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States. Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race. Illiterate whites were often permitted to vote without taking these literacy tests because of grandfather clauses written into legislation.

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.
Hahaha both sides, am I right. Ahahahahh
Shut the he fuck up and actually vote in primaries and we will have better candidates.
- I vote in all the primaries you shut the fuck up you don't know who you are talking to dude
  The options in the primaries usually suck too or the people in power push out the ones the people actually like.

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.

Who determines the questions and answers? Now they are the ones determining who can vote and thus the people in control.

They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.

It's not working. We have relatively equal education in Germany, and we have plenty of intelligent, educated people voting far right.

“Educated” does not equal intelligent, and it certainly does not imply broad intelligence. You can train a relatively stupid human being to do all kinds of stuff and if you’ve ever worked with people with degrees you know what little value they carry.
I went to college and have white collar career and my family is largely university educated. I worked with structural engineers at my last job and half them were just barely able to do their jobs with the worst ones being the senior people. Elsewhere in the world there have been anti-vax doctors and nurses, psychotic therapists, and theologians who have read the bible who still do all the horrible things they definitely know are bullshit. I bet nearly half the people here on Lemmy know a software developer or three who shouldn’t ever touch a computer. People with degrees are more likely to be more intelligent but, especially while living in a world where they’re basically expected, that’s really just not a guarantee.
- Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It's not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.
Yup. Same in the States.
People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.
Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn't guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they're clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.
- 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.
Are they very educated then?

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

If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to vote. I think if everyone was guaranteed free access to both a high school and college education, along with all food and living costs covered for anyone studying, then I could see having at least any associates level degree being an okay barrier of entry to voting.

However, such a thing would need to be protected by some unremovable barriers. For instance, education would need to continue receiving appropriate funding, food and other living costs such as renting a room would need to be covered even as the cost for these things change. People with disabilities would need to receive proper accommodations.

A caveat I’ll add is that there would need to be more community colleges built and much more funding for pre-K thru 12th grade as well.

If voting needed an exam, they would use that exam to stop certain demographics from voting. And no, I'm not talking about the ignorant.

Surely there are no examples in American history that voting eligibility exams were used to stop certain demographics from voting.
They used to do this and it turned out exactly how you describe. I would probably also add it’d incentivize politicians to dismantle educational institutions serving certain demographics

the main function of the contemporary media: to convey the message that even if you’re clever enough to have figured out that it’s all a cynical power game, the rest of America is a ridiculous pack of sheep.
This is the trap.

-David Graeber, The Democracy Project

You mean most people know better?
How could society signal to themselves that they know?

The exam:

Q. What is the secret password? A. Make America Great Again

Ironically illiterate take

What that actually looked like:

A perfectly designed test - ambiguous enough that anyone subjected to it can be failed.
I still don't know what #11 is "supposed" to be.
- It's not supposed to be anything. There is no correct answer. The ambiguity is the point.
- Can anyone explain #1 to me? What are you supposed to circle? It says "the number or the letter". There's 1 number and the entire sentence is literally letters...
  It's like when the waiter asks "Soup or salad?" and you say "Yes".
- I think it's supposed to say "Cross out the digit necessary", so one digit, in which case cross out the 1 because there's enough 0's that crossing out one 0 isn't enough.
  It's 10 that has me confused. Is it asking for the last letter of the first word that starts with 'L' in that sentence? It doesn't actually specify.
- What's interesting about the literacy tests is how much they have in common with IQ tests!
  For example, a friend of mine remembers his childhood testing. For part of it a child is handed a set of cards and told to put them in order.
  They have pictures of a set of blocks being assembled into a structure and the sun moves in an arc in the background.
  Following the order implied by the sun is, apparently, wrong.
- And 13 is unclear if it's strictly 'more than' or 'more than or equal'
- You got enough answers but here's how you deny someone the right to vote: the question really means you need to make the number 1000000 exact as that is the number "below" the question. Not fewer, physically below.
- You cross out all of the 0s after the 1 and first 5 0s, so that the number is 100,000
  Or you cross out just the 1
- You need to cross out enough zeros so that it makes a million. Pretty sure
- Cross 1, so it's 0
There are two more pages to this and it gets worse
- https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/aale/pdfs/Voter%20Test%20LA.pdf
  This has the full thing and some explanation
Also worth pointing out, WHY the test is so bad... 1. obviously not even well educated people today can agree on the meaning of a good portion of the questions.
but the biggest thing is, not everyone had to take them... IE the key point intention was "if a parent or grandparent has ever voted, you can skip this test". which is such a blatant giving away that they don't care of an individuals knowledge, they aren't actually worried if they can read, they were just keeping first generation voters from voting... at a time when in particular a specific subset of american's were in position to be first generation voters.
- (black people, particularly)
This is like the kryptonite of autistic people... and black voters whenever they had this...
Prove you're literate by solving lateral thinking word puzzles.
I did my best. Do I get to vote?
- You do not get to vote. You drew a curve for question 12 when the instructions specified a line.
- Nope. The answer to number ten is 'a'.
  Assuming you went with "last", but that starts with 'l', not 'L'. Each other question also specifies "one this line" where relevant, but not this one. The first word starting with 'L' is "Louisiana".
  The trick of the test is that it's subjective to the person grading it. I could have also told you that the line drawing one (12) was wrong by just saying it's not the correct way to do it. Or that 11 was wrong because you didn't make the number below one million, it's equal to one million. Or if you crossed off one more zero I'd say you could have gotten fewer by crossing off the 1 at the start. Or that a long string of zeros isn't a properly formatted number.
- Here's a more straightforward test. Please share the RGB value from the site below that most closely matches your skin tone and I'll let you know if you pass or fail.
  https://rgbcolorpicker.com/
- Number 11 says, "cross out the number," as in, only one number. Pretty sure you have to cross out "1" so that it's just a bunch of zeros.
- Deleted
@mkwt@lemmy.world @Blujayooo@lemmy.world
TIL I'm possibly partially (if not entirely) illiterate.
Starting with the first question, "Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.", which can be ELI5'd as follows:
The main object is the number or letter of this sentence, which is the number or letter signaling the sentence, which is "1", which is a number, so it's the number of this sentence, "1". This is fine.
The action being required is to "Draw a line around" the object, so, I must draw a line.
However, a line implies a straight line, while around implies a circle (which is round), so it must be a circle.
However, what's around a circle isn't called a line, it's a circumference. And a circumference is made of infinitesimally small segments so small that they're essentially an arc. And an arc is a segment insofar it effectively connects two points in a cartesian space with two dimensions or more... And a segment is essentially a finite range of a line, which is infinite...
The original question asks for a line, which is infinite. However, any physical object is finite insofar it has a limited, finite area, so a line couldn't be drawn: what can be drawn is a segment whose length is less or equal to the largest diagonal of the said physical object, which is a rectangular paper, so drawing a line would be impossible, only segments comprising a circumference.
However, a physically-drawn segment can't be infinitesimal insofar the thickness of the drawing tool would exceed the infinitesimality from an infinitesimal segment. It wouldn't be a circumference, but a polygon with many sides.
So I must draw a polygon with enough sides to closely represent a circumference, composed by the smallest possible segments, which are finite lines.
However, the question asks for a line, and the English preposition a implies a single unit of something... but the said something can be a set (e.g. a flock, which implies many birds)... but line isn't a set...
However, too many howevers.
So, if I decide to draw a circumference centered at the object (the number 1), as in circle the number, maybe it won't be the line originally expected.
I could draw a box instead, which would technically be around it, and would be made of lines (four lines, to be exact). But, again, a line isn't the same as lines, let alone four lines.
I could draw a single line, but it wouldn't be around.
Maybe I could reinterpret the space. I could bend the paper and glue two opposing edges of it, so any segment would behave as a line, because the drawable space is now bent and both tips of the segment would meet seamlessly.
But the line wouldn't be around the object, so the paper must be bent in a way that turns it into a cone whose tip is centered on the object, so a segment would become a line effectively around the object...
However, I got no glue.
/jk
- The ambiguity was by design. It let the test proctor decide who did or did not pass with near impunity. This was used to legally deny voting rights to minorities.

This is a bad idea. You would just be creating another layer of gerrymandering.

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.
I won't call out of or the drawer for bad idea. The idea is fine. There's just zero ways to ever implement it. It's nice to dream though
- You realize that literacy tests were used to exclude minorities from voting, right? The idea is not fine because it's inherently oppressive.
- Uhh, no the idea is most certainly not "fine"
  It's only fine if you don't think about it at all beyond the surface level presentation.
- Ehh... I think it's fundamentally problematic. Why should only a subset of the adult population be allowed to vote on laws that affect everyone?
- No it's not.

It is 100% used as a weapon to disenfranchise voters.

I do however believe that it should be used on CANDIDATES.

Who gets to design the test, though?
- Me.
- That is the one fear, especially considering... a now controlling amount of politicians can't accept basic facts... so we'd see questions like "is climate change real", "how old is the earth".
- Anyone who solves a millennium prize problem earns the right to vote.
- I think it should be a coin flip. Heads or tails. You lose whichever way it lands. That'll keep the riffraff out.
- AI.
  Fight me.
Cue Cletus declaring that Obama failed it but Trump passed
While the idea of being required to pass a test to be eligible is bad for the reasons others have given, I do like the idea of having to take a test in order to run. No pass/fail, but the results are made public so we know who we're voting for. Make it a random compilation pulled from the state testing from each state, or something. With a large enough data set, we should be able to prevent people gaming the system.

Nah, the exams wouldn't be mandatory for everyone. You have a degree? Exempt. You graduated from one of the "certified" high schools (the ones in white neighborhoods but we don't call it that wink wink)? Exempt. Passed NRA shooting license exam? Exempt.

Sure. Disenfranchise most people. That's a suitable hack to a
checks notes
stable, legitimate, and responsive government.

Even China would have more political legitimacy than such a system. It would collapse almost immediately.

If you ever want a good example of functionalist ideas leading to absolutely uncritical nonsense, here it is.

Not saying this is the correct route, but I do see the cultural decay, foreign influence, and complete lack of civic duty causing massive political failures in the US in real-time as we grow lazier, less interested, and more content. Any idea how we account for that in a reasonable fashion?
- You don't. People have always said that about basically every country. What is "cultural decay"? Define "civic duty". Why is it a problem that people are content? Are we lazier? Are people on average more content now?
  The key lesson is that you can't force people to care about what you do. Inspire people and they'll follow you, don't and they'll do something else. FDR increased a sense of civic duty by paying people to do civic works.
- The problem is looking at it too functionally. You cannot fix it by "fixing" voting as if voting magically creates a functional government. It's a method to derive consensus. You cannot look at a system that is failing to produce consensus and then fix it by directly removing anything that increases consensus. That's insane.
  You need to critically look at the entire system and identify what the problem is. In this case it's largely the abstraction layers. People now interact with their government through filters even greater than the old Hearst days. Information flows from media filters to the population and from the population to government through social media filters. And both of those filters have their own agendas. Of course nobody believes the resulting government is responsive or legitimate. It's not.
  There are many potential solutions for civic engagement. But that largely means breaking down the very walls that powerful interests have created. There's no easy solution to it. Certainly not "let's make these stupid people unable to vote." A solution is much more radical and takes understanding both what you want to achieve and how the current system is preventing it.

And the approved voters just happened to be from the 50 people who controlled the testing.

There is a general rejection of such a test. Obviously voting in its current form doesn't work. If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?

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.
If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?
With you being the judge of what is the "quality of the outcome"? That isn't democratic.
- Right, who could make that judgement? And everybody voting under the influence of propaganda is also not democratic.
  So what is the moral thing to do?
An education system that doesn't aim to turn the population into diligent cattle.

Heinlein gets shit on for this, but his "citizenship through service" idea always made sense to me. Yeah you have rights, can work a regular job, and have all the benefits we traditionally associate with "citizenship" by simply being a legal resident...but if you want to vote or hold office, you need to spend a few years contributing. Maybe that's military service, or maybe that's working as a teacher in a low-income area. Regardless, voting is a privilege that SHOULD be earned by contributing to the society you want to impact FIRST.

Yeah. That just ends in the poor not having the ability to vote because they can't make time for that contribution.
Reminder that when you pay money toward the government in taxes you are working to support it in proxy.
- The way I imagined it, you would get a wage for your service and service would be customizable to account for any disability, including severe intellectual-disability.
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.
So... What's stopping the government in power from implementing systems that stop their political opponents holding those service positions?
- Yeah it's one of those ideas that work great if it's the way we had always done things for several generations...but it's not gonna work if we try to start it when anyone alive now is still...well...alive.
I also thought it a good idea at one point. I've since been convinced otherwise.
BUT, I do think we need some way for intolerant people to be stripped of the political power of the vote. I just can't figure out a way it could possibly be implemented without being weaponized against the marginalized. It may be better to implement it and attempt "constant vigilance" -- it seems like there are already necessary system that can be so weaponized that still do more good than harm.
- The only way to do it would be to fundamentally change the structure of the system so that power is distributed horizontally instead of top-down. This way, no singular individual can consolidate power over others. Essentially, we need an entirely new government and economics (as capitalism is inherently hierarchical and exploitative), a total redistribution of wealth and power of authority.
- Humans in 2025 are...well, mostly horrible. So if we're working with this stock, it's never going to work. It's more of an idea that works really well AFTER the morons die from COVID/etc. because they refused to wear a mask unless that mask let them brutalize brown folks. Long-term, I think it's in idea we shouldn't bin (as a species). But it absolutely won't work TODAY.

Ah yes, blamed the disenfranchised voters for not wanting to jump through another hoop. Its a big club, and, sorry, pal; even if you fill out the test, you ain't in it.

I wonder if it would change anything if instead of a quiz you just like handed people a printout of like a summary of how government works from Wikipedia. Like, maybe convert some people who think the president makes laws.

It would probably still be corrupted by conservatives, sadly.

If I've learned anything in the last 6 months it's that the president makes laws.
We kind of do that with ballot measures. Wel end up with a big fight over the text that gets put on the ballot. And people still leave the voting booth having completely crazy ideas about what some of them do.

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.
- 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
- Perhaps the exam should have included a section on the history of civil rights and voting suppression in the United States.
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.
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.
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!

This is probably in part a meritocracy, though how the government defines 'merit' is probably quite subjective.

Humans are all too human. A purely statistical vote such as proportional representation is most likely the most scientific method regardless of what government is elected. If a civilisation must fall through its own vices and fallacy (oh hey, we've been there before!), then let's allow the collective consciousness of our fellow human beings work it out.

Ever...so...fucking...slowly.

The most scientific method would be one that doesn't rely on a singular entity to represent the majority. It is impossible to adequately represent the interests of all within a community through one singular political entity who has full authority to dictate law, especially in a stratified society of differing classes with diametrically oppositional interests. Due to the implicit biases of the individual holding power of authority, they will always choose what is in their best interests of their respective class, which intrinsically will be to the detriment of the oppositional class.
Instead, power of authority must be distributed horizontally, all parties of interest retain autonomy, representing themselves through a multi-tiered, federated structure where any political agreements come about through consensus of those involved.