It certainly isn’t appropriate. Disfranchising redheads, short people, or Red Sox fans would indeed be arbitrary and therefore inappropriate. However, disfranchising convicted felons is legal; disfranchising those who don’t declare a party affiliation from voting in primary elections is legal; disfranchising those who don’t register is legal, disfranchising those who aren’t citizens is legal, and disfranchising those who aren’t old enough to vote is legal.
The key word is “arbitrary.” If you think that requiring a voter to have an elementary knowledge of this country’s political system is “arbitrary,” well, then, you think my proposal imposes an arbitrary condition. But legal precedent for deciding who can and cannot vote? Old as Ben Franklin’s wig.
We don’t allow minors to vote, and there is no intrinsic difference between an uninformed 17-year-old and an uninformed 71-year-old. Age is just a convenient shorthand for roughly determining if someone is mature enough for a share in the responsibilities of governing, and there is nothing wrong with introducing a more exact test than age.
Thankfully, both court decisions and the Constitution itself can be changed. The discussion is not over until everyone is satisfied, which will never happen.
Then those people would fail a very basic civics test. The US congress is bicameral, it is composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate. If most people don’t consider the Senate to be part of Congress, they are woefully ignorant of the most basic facts about US politics.
You’re right that the executive branch enforces what the legislative branch enacts. What it enforces is the law. Here, it would be the law which would say who can and cannot vote.
You say that disenfranchised people could sue for their civil rights. Under what law would they sue, the law that disenfranchised them? In your scheme, the people who would be disenfranchised would be disenfranchised by the law, which the judicial branch applies. So taking it to the courts would be useless since the judicial branch would apply the law which disenfranchised those people.
No, most people equate “Congress” with the “House of Representatives,” not the two branches. Specifically, they don’t consider their senators to be congressmen, even though technically, they are.
I suppose I could dig up a couple thousand citations where the two branches were referred to as “Congress and the Senate,” but I’m not inclined to do so for something that’s peripheral to the discussion. I agree that the correct usage is “the House and the Senate.” Moving on…
I wonder how many people the OP expects to pass these tests. Because no matter how many people think that the Senate is not part of Congress, if they answer the question, “Is the Senate a part of Congress?”, with a “No” answer, they will be wrong.
Well, you are quite explicitly creating new categories of Americans: citizens who can vote and those who aren’t worthy of it. It just happens that one reason why Americans may be excluded for voting is due to factors that relate to matters of national origin.
Wrong. I was testing you on something else. I guess that’s what politics these days have come to – presumptively accusing people of things.
There are people who think that the US is a Christian nation. I disagree, as nothing in our laws specifies that; in fact, quite the opposite. However, I would not dream of saying that someone who thinks that this is a Christian nation should be prevented from voting. In fact, the whole term “Christian nation” is somewhat ambiguous: one may correctly point out that even though the establishment of a state religion is prohibited, the practice of Christianity is reflected in many government ceremonies. Presidents swear by a Judeo-Christian God to obey laws, God is featured in the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on. So, if someone asserts that the US is a Christian nation, I could not conclude that he should be subject to loss of voting rights for holding that view. It seems that you do, and I think it’s wrong to have a political litmus test for who is qualified to vote and who is not.
Any law that deprives someone of his civil rights can be declared unconstitutional by the courts. The fact that such a law exists doesn’t prevent someone from suing for deprivation of those rights. You don’t sue “under a law”; you sue to block its enforcement as unconstitutional–a check on the executive branch. If the court strikes down the law itself, that’s a judicial check on the legislative branch.
It’s true that the citizen doesn’t usually have the right of direct appeal to the legislative branch–but that’s what the courts are for.
A year or two ago there was a California proposition election where there were two propositions on the ballot (property-rights related) that sounded from the Summary like they were completely identical. I read both propositions in their entirety, and I was unable to figure out what the salient differences were, much less which one I agreed with. I finally read a blog post by a lawyer who specialized in that field in which he laid out the differences – and they were basically completely opposed. I have a Ph.D. in physics, by the way, so I’m not the stupidest person out there. It seems to me that it would be pretty difficult to put together questions that would be useful.
This being said, I have for a while wistfully kind of wished we had some sort of test, something extremely simple, like, “Name one person (or proposition) on this ballot.” I think if you can’t name at least one person that you’d like to vote for, I am not really sure it is a good idea for you to vote. I do think that we tend to emphasize the-sheer-act-of-voting-as-a-civic-duty, whereas I rather think that one shouldn’t vote unless one has at least put minimal thought into it (minimal thought could be “well, I like Democrats and hate Republicans” or some such; I just don’t like the idea that one might go put random marks on the sheet just to say that s/he’s voted).
This is interesting. Thanks for posting it.
Heh, I’ve also wistfully wanted this to be the case. It seems weird to me that I have to jump through way more hoops to drive a car than I do to procreate! It seems that to reproduce one should be able to answer some very simple multiple-choice questions like “What is NOT appropriate to feed a newborn infant?
a) breastmilk
b) baby formula
c) steak and green beans”
…And even then I’d say there’s no way it could work practically. Even in my example, you can imagine the La Leche folks would be up in arms, someone would try feeding their baby a piece of paper with the quadratic formula on it, whatever. And of course because a test started in a simple way wouldn’t mean that in a couple of years it would be all politicized.
So for that reason I’m also against political tests, even though part of me really likes the idea.
I think the only fair way to qualify people to vote is, as you said, based on their participation in this country. As such, that means that votes should be allowed based on land ownership holdings, since that is the only real proof of commitment to this country.
No matter how educated you are, you can still just move on when you don’t like something.
I, on the other hand, cannot just up and move the farm that I’ve built. So the only fair way to do it is to allot votes accordingly:
1 vote for every acre owned
1 vote for every square foot under roof on that property
1 vote for each vehicle or piece of equipment that weighs over 500 pounds
1 vote for every 1000 pounds of livestock
By my calculation, I should get 15,000+ votes in the next election and those transient renter slime bags down the road should get none.
ETA: Oh, and by the way, I have many neighbors who would not pass your tests, but would rate tens of thousands of votes under my system.
Disfranchising somebody because you don’t like the language they speak seems pretty arbitrary to me. Why do you think an American citizen who speaks English deserves a vote more than an American citizen who speaks Spanish or an American citizen who speaks Chinese? American citizenship has nothing to do with language.
Do the majority of Americans speak English? Sure, but it’s a matter for individual preference not government regulation. Saying you have to speak English to vote because the majority of Americans speak English is no different than saying the majority of Americans are Protestant, so Catholics and Jews can’t vote.
Sigh. Most people consider senators not to be congresspersons though in fact, they are. Common usage often refers to the House of Representatives as “Congress,” exclusive of the Senate.
In my OP, I differentiated between voting for a senator and voting for a congressman. Now, let’s get off this tangent–(“he doesn’t know the difference between the House and the Senate so what’s he doing talking about a civics test for voters, neener neener neener”–childish).
Miller’s argument was that people who are disenfranchised have no recourse. If the law which disenfranchises them is declared constitutional, they don’t have a recourse. To take his typo example, if a law said that a typo is enough to disenfranchise someone, what recourse would you have to change your disenfranchisement?
Just because many people think something doesn’t necessarily mean most people think something. (And – this is weak evidence, but the only evidence I’ve got – a google search gives twice as many instances of “The House and the Senate” as it does for “Congress and the Senate.”) Logical fail. You would not get to vote in my benevolent dictatorship. (Yes, people would get to vote in my benevolent dictatorship, just not to vote to topple ME.)
(Actually, that’s an idea! Ask people logic and statistics questions! Only the people who understand that A implies B does NOT mean that B implies A get to vote! When I run for office, this’ll be my platform… I anticipate a whole two people voting for me!)
It does highlight that schemes like yours, though well-intentioned, have a habit of establishing a threshold which excludes a lot of people while always including the proposer. I too, think that too many people who aren’t like me vote and that not enough people who are like me vote.
Aside from retaining the ability to make a court challenge based on the law’s invalidity on a number of possible grounds, including its purported unconstitutionality, I would have the more roundabout recourse of advocating for the election of legislators who agreed with me and might be persuaded to vote to strike down the law (and yes, I wouldn’t be able to vote for such persons, but even a disfranchised person can influence the process in a number of ways, such as volunteering, campaign contributions, etc.).
In any case, it is a reductio ad absurdum, a grade-school debate tactic which I hate, to equate disqualifying someone based on the criteria I proposed with disqualifying someone because of a typographical error. We have to make the ingoing premise that our laws will not be ludicrous.
Not everybody was or is able to stay awake during civics lessons, history class, English grammar, or any other class. Having a high school degree does not make a person educated, nor necessarily conversant in all the topics taught therein. The Navy required a high school degree, and I would suspect that the men I referred to in my previous post had said degree or equivalent. Most of them managed to get by, and the system passed them through. Using your logic, someone should be able to do math in order to open a bank account.
Your self-serving sarcasm at the end of your post is in error. You’re not being mean, but you ARE advocating a constitutional change for the purpose of limiting the rights of citizens. The purpose of the Amendments is to guarantee rights, not to exclude them. This is what makes the so-called “Defense of Marriage” amendment so egregious.
You can impute, if you wish, the motive for my proposal to be to exclude those who “aren’t like me.”
I actually self-exclude by not voting on propositions/ballot initiatives that I haven’t cared enough about to become familiar with. I would advocate for my own general exclusion if I didn’t meet my own criteria.