This reminds me of the list of possible tests for the right to vote in Heinlein’s Expanded Universe. Heinlein had been involved in politics in his youth (as a radical leftie, to hear some tell it – pretty surprising, considering his sorta libertarian but rightist slant when older), and did some interesting playing around with what would constitute the polity in his books (have a look at Tunnel in the Sky, or his most famous example, Starship Troopers, besides Expanded Universe). He surely didn’t suggest all of these in all seriousness, but they’re a hoot to read:
1.) Math Ability – you step into the voting booth, and are confronted with a quadratic equation. Solve it and you can vote. My wife would LOVE this one. Math isn’t her strong suit. In another variation, he suggests that, if you can’t solve the problem, maybe you don’t get to leave the booth.
2.) Only Mothers get the vote – they have a proven investment in the future.
3.) You have to pay – in gold – to vote — it would prove that you were serious about it. So what if poor people can’t vote? The rich have a bigger investment
5.) You can buy multiple votes – see above
6.) The virtuous get more votes – who decides who’s virtuous
7.) Those who have rendered national service can vote – his “Starship Troopers” plan. Only veterans (not serving military. or its equivalent in service) can vote.
Would any of these work? I can see ways to manipulate all of them, leading to fraud. The one good thing you can say about the ideal of the present system is that it’s about as fair as you can get – no judgment calls mean less opportunity for screwing with the system. But the recent hijinks with disenfranchisement because of supposed criminal records, or the brouhaha over voter ID shows that people can still try to screw with the system.
In other words, you mentioned the poor because you were afraid that if you mentioned the blacks and Hispanics like you really wanted to, you’d be called a racist.
You might want to look at the other groups in this nation’s history who have proposed literacy tests and poll taxes targeted at blacks, and see what sort of company you’ve found yourself in.
Yes, who decides (adjudicates) whether or not you can read and write Engish at the required level? Your mom? Your fifth grade teacher? A panel of local university professors and librarians? A bunch of KKK members who would do anything to disenfranchise non-whites?
Incidentally, the OP has 3 misspellings in it. Were I adjudicating, I’d fail him for that. Don’t like it? Well, you can try again next year. I’m very strict with comma usage, though, just so you know.
So people who don’t speak English are stupid and lazy? Hard to understand how some people twist this around into some kind of bigotry. It’s just a scientific fact that speaking English makes you smarter than speaking some other language.
How about this as a counter-proposal? In the interest of having an objective standard of education and intelligence, we require all voters to demonstrate they can speak and read at least two languages.
The premise of Starship Troopers was that everyone had an absolute right to serve - if you wanted to serve in order to get your vote afterwards, the government had to accept you.
But as you noted, any system can be manipulated. One argument against Heinlein’s system that I haven’t seen is that its outcome could be manipulated. The government might be obligated to accept anyone into the service but it had absolute control over what that service was. I could easily see a system evolving where the “right” people were assigned to easy jobs for two years while the “wrong” people got assigned combat duties with low survival rates. And with the survivors controlling the system, it would be self-perpetuating.
Even if a knowledge test is honestly designed and fairly administered, it acts as a barrier to voting by adding inconvenience. Either people must sign up for the test far in advance of the election, or they must take the test on Election Day, which turns voting from a five-minute proposition into something much longer.
Furthermore, taking tests isn’t high on most people’s list of fun things to do. People will blow it off for that reason alone.
When they do, voting will be limited to the most committed ideologues–people who spend lots of time thinking about Government, and for whom control of the Government is the Brass Ring by which they can take other people’s money and force other people to live the way they want.
I don’t want those to be the only people voting. I want voters to be people who spend most of their time working, raising kids, running businesses, and volunteering, for whom politics is a small part of their lives and a necessary evil.
Next, let’s make parents have to answer a few questions before reproducing! Sure, that’ll fly, what a great idea, why haven’t we thought of it before?
If you declassify some from voting, will they still be paying taxes? Income? Sales? Wouldn’t that be creating a class of people who are experiencing, ‘taxation without representation’? Y’all seemed pretty strident, the last time that issue came up!
It’s not that any such system would be inherently evil, it’s just that all such systems tried in the past carried the weight of racism and deliberate disenfranchisement.
A workable system might be one where you get your voter’s license along with your drivers license. A simple test could be devised, same as the written rules of the road test that one must pass with say 50% to get their card. Those who have their card have their votes weighted by +.25 a vote. I’d suggest that the content include basic questions about political issues and terms and that the test be revised as necessary to reflect changing issues. Keep it simple and easy to pass:
There isn’t any reason for the questions to be partisan or overly detailed. Just a simple test that demonstrates that the voter has a basic understanding of what is out there.
Being uneducated should not mean you are no longer entitled to the same freedoms and rights that every American is guaranteed under the Constitution. Read Animal Farm, if you didn’t in high school: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” I would venture to say that if you chose any random 100 people on the street and asked them the same questions that are asked of a citizenship applicant (basic Civics 101), few of them would be able to answer them adequately. These are basic things like “How does a bill become a law?” It doesn’t inhibit their ability to understand what a candidate’s platform is, or to understand what a ballot measure is about.
Well, the question certainly seems to have irritated a lot of people. I don’t know greenslime1951 personally, but I don’t see the question as particularly racist.
On first contact, it seems a valid proposal… but there’s no way to administer it fairly. I agree that there have been abuses in the past, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and that there’s no reason to believe there wouldn’t be abuses this time around. And the system can even be gamed, as madmonk28 said, by giving an inferior education to some part of the population.
So let’s consider the proposal naïve, and somewhat paradoxical (since the OP, if he meets his own criteria, should be aware of these past abuses).
The voting criteria we use today are those that were established decades or centuries ago. They’re pretty good, but somewhat arbitrary.
For instance, many people have mixed feelings about allowing the mentally ill to vote. I was certainly ill at ease when my mother, who had Alzheimer’s, talked about voting in the election: it was not election season, and she had no idea that her favorite candidate had been dead for many years.
The current rules say that you have to be 18 years old (or some other fixed age, depending on location). The reason children and teenagers are excluded is that it’s assumed they don’t know enough about life, politics, money, current events, etc. to be able to form a valid opinion. So the underlying intentions are similar to those stated in the OP. We’re excluding a lot of smart 16-year-olds and accepting a lot of dumb 18-year-olds by enforcing a strict voting age.
Thank you for considering the question seriously. Yes, obviously, the test(s) could be carefully examined to make sure they were free of bias.
I am greatly amused by how people here, in an attempt not to be racist, automatically assume that members of ethnic minority groups wouldn’t be able to read at the eighth grade level or pass the test(s), or that they wouldn’t be able to educate themselves sufficiently to do so.