Is literacy a requirement of citizenship?
My grandmother was illiterate, yet I remember her going to vote. How did she become a citizen without knowing how to read? And how did she vote without knowing how to read the ballot? And for that matter, how do blind people vote?
If you think about it, only the naturalized are literate at the point they become citizens. Being illiterate is not incommensurate with being a good judge of character, nor of forming oinions on the issues through listening and asking questions.
A person unable to read a ballot, for whatever reason, is generally permitted to be accompanied to vote by someone able to read it.
For naturalised citizens, the answer is “Yes”, I suppose. According to the USCIS eligibility requirements:
This hasn’t always been the rule, I don’t think, which may explain why your grandmother was able to naturalise despite being illiterate.
Did your grandmother immigrate from somewhere else? There have always been sub-populations of people in the U.S. that were citizens by birth but weren’t literate at all and/or couldn’t speak English because of where they were raised.
She came to this country from Eastern Europe when she was in her early 20s, around 1905. She was already married and had a daughter. Since there were so many immigrants back then, especially from that part of the world, it’s possible that the literacy requirement were more lax. It’s also possible that my grandfather was literate, if that’s relevant.
So blind people cannot become citizens?
Oh, yes, different requirements at the time made it quite plausible for someone illiterate to become naturalized. I don’t even know if pre-WW1 they had to take the civics test at all (or if the citizenship of the head of household ever extended to the whole family automatically). Even after the establishment of the “civics test”, for decades it was ridiculously simple and could be taken orally.
As it is, even in our times the elderly past a certain age and time of residence do not need to pass the English Literacy test.
As for the vote of the blind and illiterate, there are accommodations made for them. Used to be many states had a literacy requirement but those were ditched since, well, there were specific population groups more adversely affected.
Around here, for instance, the ballots have party symbols and pictures or logos of each candidate next to their names, and are color coded by whether it’s the gubernatorial, legislative or municipal ballot (and stateside I suppose even the illiterate can eventually learn to recognize “R” and “D” in the ballot). With the blind, various means get implemented, they usually get directed to the Accessible Polling Place which has the required assistive technology at hand (e.g. Braille ballots)
There are exceptions to the need to know English:
It’s amazing how few people know about this exception, and are shocked that there are naturalized citizens who don’t know English.
Implementation of that rule appears to be somewhat faulty, though; I know several people who got naturalized despite knowing just enough English… to pass the citizenship test (they’d trained by rote). This was in the late 1990s, the rule was already in place, and they didn’t get any exemptions. Oh, and most of them were literate, just not literate in English or capable of holding a coherent conversation in English.
Flaw in your reasoning there: voting is not a requirement of citizenship, therefore saying that literacy is required to be a citizen is incorrect.
I believe there’s an SD article somewhere about signing legal documents with an X instead of your name being acceptable to accommodate the illiterate.
By being born in the United States, most likely.
Maybe they’re required to read Braille.