Why No Voting Test?

Politics & Elections
21

That’s a rather dismissive response.

Say that there are two possible reasons that I might enact a literacy test, in order to gain the right to vote:

  1. To prevent minorities from voting
  2. To reduce the number of votes which come from people who are unlikely to have reasoned, learned opinions.

To be sure, one solution to making this requirement unprejudiced is to just remove the requirement. But that’s at the cost of item #2. The other alternative is to educate minorities so that they are capable, intelligent people, who are a full part of the general populace, and who have earned their place. This takes longer, but it doesn’t lower the standards of the nation.

The goal of having a republic is to give the public the chance to search for and find people whom they trust to be wise, benevolent, and fair when it comes to governance. I bet you’ll find that people who are better educated and better informed are the ones who are most likely to vote along these lines, rather than simply voting for whomever will give them a handout of some form.

Slavery was ended due to the votes of a bunch of wealthy, educated, white men who voted for representatives who couldn’t conscionably continue to protect the act of slavery. If those slaves had been members of the voting public, would they have voted to free the slaves? Possibly, but if that’s not because of reasoned and moral logic, then adding them to the voting pool just means that when it comes time to allow women to vote or to allow homosexuals to marry, you might have just diluted the voting pool of people who would have voted intelligently.

If you think that you have to lower standards permanently for minorities to have a chance, then that’s definitely racist. But I’d be suspicious that lowering them even temporarily is a particularly good thing. It might not be kind, but it’s entirely fair to demand that people earn their place in society. Allowing them to get by without earning their place has only ever allowed the divides between groups to stay unchallenged, and for different standards to be accepted for decades on end.

22

At least I got in before those August 2012 losers, right?

I just wanted to joint the intelligentsia so bad.

23

Not in my time zone.

24

In America, you earn that by being born in America. That’s what we call one of them there cornerstone traditions.

But since we’re being all hypothetical and everything, I’ll make a concession. Let’s go ahead and fix the educational system so that all students in every school district in every county in every state in this country is getting a quality education under equally excellent conditions by quality teachers in quality positions, then we can talk.

What’s that you say? We’re cutting educational funding all across the country and have been doing so for years on end? That’s so weird. Oh well, I’m sure it won’t affect anything very much.

25

These are the ones that started the migration out entirely in the wrong direction. We pointed them south trying to loose them (even we have to have our standards!). Expect them to be straggling in for most of August. :smiley:

26

Nope.

Sloppy metaphor.

Edit:

Literacy tests would probably still be discriminatory in effect and thus liable for challenge under the Voting Rights Act. Not to mention, I have faith enough in the US populace to remember and reject the dog-whistle.

27

Didn’t we just do all this in a recent thread in IMHO?

28

Actually, I doubt that this really has much bearing on voting.
It probably gives one a nice warm feeling, (particularly if one is literate), but I have seen no evidence of its accuracy.

People seem to vote for the people or parties who make them feel best served, regardless of any particular rational thought that may or may not lay behind it. One can find any number of people who can argue all day long about Keynes or the Chicago School, but the vast majority of people who choose one or the other do so because it seems to them that the side they pick resonates better with their personal experience. Similarly regarding socialism or capitalism or isolationism or interventionism. The more educated a person is, the more likely that that person can marshall a lot of information to support the position that he or she already chose on an emotional basis, but the odds of finding a person who started out with no preconceived beliefs, read all the information, reasoned their way through that information, and chose a particular course are probably less than .001% of the population.

Now, this is not to disparage education. I suspect that a person who reads broadly will be more likely to modify his or her beliefs in accord with overwhelming evidence. Or, more likely, a person who reads broadly will be more likely to encounter information that changes their personal “experience” so that their emotional choices will develop different bases from which to arise.

However, in this society, that is already overwhelmingly literate, we still see people making their choices, (or getting their information), from electronic media where their literacy is almost irrelevant. This is the point made by folks on the political Right that the so-called “liberal media” has shaped society’s values to accept abortion and homosexuality. It is also the point of those on the Left who note that the overwhelming number of people who support the Iraqi invasion or the Tea Parties are regular viewers of Fox News. People tend to watch what already makes them feel good. Back in the days before electronic media, (when most cities even of modest size, had multiple newspapers promoting particular political views), it was a truism that one knew a person’s politics by which newspaper he read. People picked their sources of information, whether print or electronic, according to how they already felt about the world.

Putting a literacy bar in front of a ballot box will not stop people who think that the Democrats or Republicans will guarantee them a better life, (based on wealth or freedom to engage in various behaviors or feeling good about the actions their country takes), from voting their feelings. I have known many engineers and businessmen who read nothing but the sports section and any number of academics who never read anything outside their particular field of study. Since literacy fails to guarantee that people will “search for and find people whom they trust to be wise, benevolent, and fair when it comes to governance” it is just wishful thinking to assert that some minimum level of education will ensure that behavior–or even promote it.

29

You’re wrong. 200 years of usage says so. Usage defines meaning.

The U.S. is now part of the dictionary definition of democracy.

Today you can call the U.S. a democracy or a republic. They are both correct. If you were sincere in trying to define what the Founding Fathers set up, an oligarchy is a much better term, since voting was limited to free white male property owners. The first federal election, in 1788, saw only around 1% of the population voting, which was exactly as they intended. The Senate was removed from the popular vote and given to state legislatures so that even that small section of the population had no chance to determine them.

No, it is the only correct response.

I thought for a second that you might have understood that you are calling for an oligarchy and that leads to disaster, but this statement is wrong in many ways. Voters did not end slavery. Voters who were members of the oligarchy in the South continued slavery until the Civil War ended it. By the Civil War, voting had been opened up to the common people, the demos, the root word of democracy. Yes, Northern legislatures slowly banned slavery within their states over the course of about 50 years, but they did so for economic as much as moral reasons.

Voters have gotten by without earning their place since the Jacksonian era. The U.S. has certainly been termed a democracy in common usage since the Jacksonian era. The years since have seen a continued move toward inclusion, both in voting and in the greater society. Exclusion has always lead to more horrendous ills than inclusion, which is why anybody who has studied history has such a visceral reaction to talk of legally sanctioned exclusion.

Legally sanctioned exclusion is not democratic or republican: it is oligarchic. Voting needs to be universal in a democracy. (Like the First Amendment, tiny exceptions can be made which is why felons can’t vote, e.g.) You may be correct that exclusion can be traced directly back to the beginning. And you are correct that exclusion is not democratic. You’re just plain wrong when you try to claim that the U.S. is not a democracy. It is, but only because we threw off the founders’ oligarchy early in our existence and have been creating ourselves as the exemplar of what a democracy is ever since.

30

The problem with this idea (the OP) is that the uneducated represent a specific demographic in American society, one with its own desires and needs. If you remove their right to vote, however imperfectly they may use that right, you guarantee that those desires and needs will not be adequately represented. If it isn’t democracy for all it isn’t democracy.

31

That is not a legitimate goal; see below.

No, sir. As H.L. Mencken put it, “Democracy is the idea that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” It is not a theory of good government, it is a theory of legitimate government; sovereignty is vested in the people as a whole because, where else could it justly be vested? If the people want leaders who are unwise, unfair, etc., then that is what they should have a chance to get.

You are assuming we need to have standards; but this is not a field where we need to, or should.

32

I was going to go with stupid people are governed so they should be allowed to vote but you said it much better. :smiley:

33

Put another way:

When Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” he was making an ethical rather than a scientific assertion. Certainly we are not all equal in moral character, civic virtue, intelligence, education, wisdom, wealth, or any other quality you might name that might be argued to be relevant to equality or inequality. What he really meant, at bottom, was that all are equally ends-in-themselves. Or, as a radical during the English Civil War put it, “The poorest he that is in England has a life to live just as the greatest he.” Which was pretty radical for its day. Even though such a view is implicit in Christianity, which views every soul as equally precious, nevertheless it was generally assumed then that some persons are of greater value than others in that they are more entitled to enjoy the good things, and the others merely to minister to them. But the Jeffersonian/democratic view is, even if you are better than me in X or Y respect, that does not mean you have any greater claim than I to have your interests and desires considered. Your suffering and joy are not of greater nor lesser value than mine. We are all equal in the sense that we all have to live in the same society together, and, whatever decisions our shared government makes or does not make, whatever actions it takes or does not take, we all have to live equally with the results. That is why my vote counts neither more nor less than yours.

34

We do this one every few months or every year.

35

Actually, we’ve been we’ve been increasing educational funding, even on a per-capita inflation-adjusted basis, and have been for decades.

36

If I was born in this country I have equal rights to anyone else born in this country.
Even if I were kept in a box from the moment of birth I would have the same rights as someone who was given the finest education.
I deserve the same right to representation as everyone else. If that means I want to vote for someone just like me who was raised in a box, that is my right.
No one should have the power or right to disenfranchise me from those rights. Just as I should not have the power or right to disenfranchise them.
Per-i-od.

37

This is why we have history classes, children!

The fact is, it wasn’t administered fairly when we had it. Whites were “grandfathered in” or given passing grades by the white clerks, while blacks were basically never allowed to pass.

Doing it fairly? Nice idea in theory. But it would probably be abused again, and who would write the test?

Nah, in practice, it could turn into a litmus test for the TEA Party or something, and at that point you might as well just outlaw other parties, because THAT WOULD BE THE POINT.

38
  1. I infer that you’re willing to let the “majority” get by without earning their place in society, because they’re grandfathered in. That’s no good.
  2. Maintaining different classes with different privileges strengthens divisions. Your argument is silly on its face.
39

Say that the world becomes a better, more liberal place with better representation for all because of it. How is that “no good”? Philosophically, for example, communism is more fair and saves a greater number of people from hardship. In practice, the opposite occurs.

The road to the perfect doesn’t need to make sense from a mathematical standpoint, it needs to make sense once you take into account human nature.

Our nation is a Republic not because of the desire to be fair, but out of the desire to get the best results for the nation.

Meritocracy is not a class system. There’s nothing in the world to stop population subgroup A from focusing on ensuring that every single one of their children would receive a passing grade on a political literacy test.

I personally have no doubt that there’s any subgroup of the population, outside of those with mental handicaps, who can’t learn to pass a basic political literacy test. We’re all humans with, effectively, the same DNA and the same abilities. No one is asking you to be a calculus whiz, just to demonstrate that you are aware of what you are doing and can form opinions of your own.

40

:mad::mad::mad: No, it is not, sir. Society is something into which everyone is simply born, willy-nilly, and in which everyone is equally entitled to a “place” for that reason alone.