We have hundreds of historic examples here of how allowing the denial of voting rights for any reason is an incredibly slippery slope, and it is rightfully banned except in a tiny number of instances (felons) that still need to be rectified. And yes, the war on drugs is itself a successful voter suppression effort -- make enough things illegal, and convict enough people of felonies, and you can meaningfully alter the make-up of the electorate. This has actually happened.
The problem is what grade level?
1st grade: What country do you live in?
3rd grade: Name all 3 branches of government
6th grade: How is a bill made into a law?
9th grade: Who are your elected representatives and what are their positions on issues A, B & C?
...
PhD: Compare and contrast Hamilton and Jefferson's viewpoints on the Constitutional convention, banking and personal liberties and how they shaped and influenced US policy in the last 40 years (20 pages or less)
Countries have tried an aristocratic, ruling class and it doesn't work because it disenfranchises the masses and leads to a populist revolt.
These tests were also used in the US to disenfranchise minorities who couldn't read or afford to go to school.
Plus, I had a friend in college who was one of the 537 deciding votes in Broward county in 2000 who voted for Bush because "Gore was boring". He was smart and would have easily passed any civics test you gave him, but he voted based on personality rather than any specific issue.
Maybe that's the level you feel comfortable with? That's great until someone smarter than you comes along and thinks that the test is too easy and too many "uneducated" people are voting. I love history and politics, but I don't know everything and I know that there are tests that can be drafted that I can't pass. Are you willing to be on the outside looking in, willing to be presented with a test so hard you can't pass it and can't vote? Willing to be represented by officials that you can never peacefully vote out of office? How long until a narcissist decides that they're the only one smart enough to vote? That's unfortunately the fate of every country that's fallen into a dictatorship.
I see that you want an educated electorate but voting tests have been tried before and tons of innocent, smart, well-intentioned people get cut off in the process. Democracy is the only form of government we know of where we can meaningfully and non-violently express our collective opinion as a group. When you take a vote away from someone, they're left with a choice between compliance or violence, neither of which are good.
Maybe, the paid public education you mention would still be a good idea, just without the voting rights test.
If you think people are too stupid to vote, then you're not trying hard enough to ensure that they have the issues explained to them.
How easy is it to go from "you don't understand civics" so you can't vote, to "you have the wrong religion" or "you have the wrong skin colour" you can't vote.
This has been tried in the US before, many times; some were Federal, but most were state and county level. You should probably read up on it before pitching this idea anymore, because it has never been a good thing.
Also, it's Unconstitutional.
It’s the Democrats that say an ID to vote is racist, while saying an ID is not racist for things like driving, flying, buying alcohol, working, getting a firearm, welfare checks, and so much more.
It’s the Democrats that literally removed the signature requirement on ballots? (PA) What possible reason is there for this, if not to open the door for fraudulent voting, multiple votes per person etc...
Not a rhetorical question. Someone please help me understand the other side of this?
- Voting is a right, driving/flying/etc are not. Getting a driver's license is more about certifying your ability to drive than your identity.
- Signature requirements are tricky because they are very subjective. You're counting on the unbiased assessment of thousands of volunteers to determine if signatures match. That doesn't make it racist, but it's easy to imagine a poll worker intentionally or unintentionally disenfranchising valid voters. So the key question is, does it actually reduce voter fraud by more than the false negative rate?
Everywhere I've lived, the voter rolls and the voting process are designed in such a way that adding a free voter ID to the process would change very little. It's already very difficult to orchestrate fraud without detection.
The ACLU put out a fact sheet with some more details on voter ID: https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
Bearing arms is also a right, and yet there are all sorts of restrictions on the exercise of that right.
Without some form of ID or some one-time-use voucher that can only be obtained by eligible voters, how could anyone trust the veracity of the system? Honor system? Seems weak.
That would be lovely.
> If republicans were actually interested in election integrity and civic participation
I have no hope in this will come to pass.
This is very true. The same people who often argue loudly for privacy, security, are willing to have a hole in the election system, probably the more important of any of those things.
Up to now, it's been "well, there's very little fraud going on", as if that makes it fine to ignore. Showing ID to vote in our most fundamental democratic process is NOT a stupid or crazy idea. And it has become the rallying cry of the paranoid and conspiracy believers.
Fault the Democrats for letting themselves be accused of voter fraud in the name of not making it hard to vote (solution: give everyone the IDs they need, easily, as suggested), and fault the Republicans for using voter ID as a way to make it harder to vote (solution: stop being underhanded jerks).
And lastly, I have to fault the people who can't get their shit together enough once per 5 or 10 years (ID expiration timescale) for such an important piece of identification and key to so many other things. How do they get through life every day if they can't even do this one thing that infrequently? And sadly, how bad a situation is it that your party has to rely on these people to get you over the majority line?
So apparently it's not 100% effective at silencing complaints about voting fraud.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-...
Spell backwards, forwards.
The answer is "backwards"... except I told you to spell it "forwards". You fail. You can't vote.
Oh, and, yes: One wrong answer means you can't vote.
I got a whole test worth right here:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test
One more question:
Draw five circles that one common inter-locking part.
No matter how you interpret that, it's wrong, and you can't say otherwise without being lynched.
People should have to take a Civics based test to vote. If someone wants to vote but fails the civics test, they should then immediately qualify for a minimum living wage job to go back to public education and get paid for getting at least an 80% grade at whatever grade level they're working at (obviously with either enrollment at lower grade levels, classification as disability if unable to learn or medically impaired, and similar options also on the table).
The goal would be to make sure that an EDUCATED and Civically Informed public, able to use Critical Thinking skills is the baseline expectation for a functional society in which the general people have the civic duty to be involved in the processes of self government and representative selection for representative democracies.