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Yeah it sounds fun unless you have any awareness of how this actually worked out when it was used in the past. Fully not okay.
You mean tests that were designed to ensure that only “the right people” were able to pass them. As well as a grandfather clause that exempted all of those right people (in modern times there would likely be a voter roll purge that would somehow lose most liberal voters while miraculously keeping all of the conservative ones).
It’s not all lazy and slow-witted voters, the media presents the news as if we all had a degree in government. That’s apparently what they’ve put in as a filter but it only allows the worst of the bunch to fly by the seat of their pants, getting their vote from impressions and gut feelings.
Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase, it would take all but five seconds for X party to cheat their exams, kind of like the “grandfather law” which essentially bypassed jim crow era literacy tests for everyone who was white.
Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase
“Educated” is already doing some heavy lifting. What education are you demanding voters possess?
Because I’ve had an earful about “Marxist Professors corrupting our youth!” for my entire life. I doubt conservatives would consider any kind of liberal exam a legitimate test of voting aptitude.
Meanwhile, there’s enough jingoism and nationalism in our education system already, such that I could see an exam question “Which religious extremist sect was responsible for 9/11? Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists” or “Is an individual with XY chromosomes a man or a woman?” that’s a bit… loaded? Especially when administered right before a national election.
This is always shot down because eventually someone in control will change the test to introduce bias in their favor.
But, what if: Make there be one concrete, completely unchangeable rule. The test must be a math question.
No hypothetical story to make the question ‘relevant’ (E.g. Bob and Alice each have x and y … calculate z). Just raw math.
There is no biasing a math question.
Perhaps an integral or differential equation with randomly chosen constants.
Yeah, it doesn’t filter for civic education.
Yeah, people could prepare and/or give out targeted explainers for the type of question after first voting/mail-in voting day.
Yeah, it will still let some shitty people vote and deny some good people from voting.
But there is no biasing a math question.
Probably will still have more problems in practice. Big ones being making an ‘unchangeable’ rule, or it being made ineffective by changing the question to something like simple addition.
Not necessarily saying this should be done or is a good idea. Just putting the thought out there.
Fuck no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States. Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race. Illiterate whites were often permitted to vote without taking these literacy tests because of grandfather clauses written into legislation.
The problem there is the administration of the tests, not the tests themselves.
And that is a non-solvable problem.
We just need to make sure the voting machines are not racist. Solvable, if we’re starting from scratch.
The phrase “voting machine” is also a problem.
Only when accompanied by “paperless” or “closed source”
Nope. It’ll never work. Because when I walk into the voting booth, how do I KNOW FOR A VERIFIABLE FACT that this machine here in the booth with me is running the published software?
Computerized voting will always be a mistake.
The machine produces a physical paper record you can read, it doesn’t matter what software it’s running if you can verify your vote is accurate.
Computerized voting will always be a mistake.
disagrees in brazilian voting machine noises
you think the current racist rich people wouldn’t be racist and rich if we introduced an exam to the voting process?
I think the qualifying questions could be attached to the ballot and submitted anonymously.
Race should not be discernable … in theory.
Everyone affected by the policy decisions of the land should get to vote. No matter their race, literacy or political belief
Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not. This is too big of a decision to leave up to disinterested and ill informed voters. I don’t care if you are left or right. blue or red.
If you don’t know the basics of how our government works you do not deserve to have a say. If you do not know the basics of what is happening in the country, then you do not deserve to vote.
ANYONE voting should be informed.
How we test for this? i have no idea. There can not be a simple education requirement or literacy test. There are plenty of uneducated people that are very up to date and informed on current politics. There are plenty of very educated people that don’t care about what’s going on and just vote by party.
But just because you have the right to an opinion does not mean your ignorant opinion is worth anything.
Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not.
Jesus. You’re literally arguing for removing franchise from the majority of citizens. If they primarily reside in an area and will be affected by the policies, they should be able to vote on them, whether or not they’re ignorant.
The problem is that you can very, very quickly arrive at the conclusion that if someone just had enough knowledge, they’d vote like me, and strip the vote from everyone that doesn’t agree with you. Except that people can, and do, have different beliefs, even with the same knowledge.
I certainly trust The Party That’s In Charge At Any Given Time to subjectively come up with the criteria that objectively determines a voter’s ignorance level
A check to make sure they understand exactly what they are voting for seems sensible.
Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?
The tests never explicitly directly measured race nor required the voters name. They can design the tests to discriminate all sorts of ways based on the content.
This is true. Whoever decides the questions and determines the correct answer holds a lot of power.
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Brazil had something like that in the early republic days, only literate people could vote. Needless to say, only the robber baron elites kept getting elected, also thanks to the significant amount of fraud that happened. “The election is won during the counting”
Good point, maybe the idea works better in theory than practice. Haha
Who determines the questions and answers? Now they are the ones determining who can vote and thus the people in control.
They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.
If voting needed an exam, they would use that exam to stop certain demographics from voting. And no, I’m not talking about the ignorant.
They used to do this and it turned out exactly how you describe. I would probably also add it’d incentivize politicians to dismantle educational institutions serving certain demographics
Surely there are no examples in American history that voting eligibility exams were used to stop certain demographics from voting.
What that actually looked like:
A perfectly designed test - ambiguous enough that anyone subjected to it can be failed.
I still don’t know what #11 is “supposed” to be.
Can anyone explain #1 to me? What are you supposed to circle? It says “the number or the letter”. There’s 1 number and the entire sentence is literally letters…
It’s like when the waiter asks “Soup or salad?” and you say “Yes”.
I can help! So the first step is to be white, and then the second step is to do whatever you think seems right
Circle? It clearly says draw a line around whatever you decided wrongly to indicate. Lines don’t curve and aren’t boxes, so good luck.
This was my first hold up. I think the correct answer is to print the test onto a substrate that can be molded into a sphere. Then you can draw a geodesic around the number.
A
I think.
I read it as “1.” Which underlines the point, I think
Oh, yes. Reading it again you’re correct. I was looking for the number of letter on the sentence. When it clearly says of. Guess I don’t deserve to vote.
I think it’s supposed to say “Cross out the digit necessary”, so one digit, in which case cross out the 1 because there’s enough 0’s that crossing out one 0 isn’t enough.
It’s 10 that has me confused. Is it asking for the last letter of the first word that starts with ‘L’ in that sentence? It doesn’t actually specify.
Yeah, but the actual answer is how white are you?
I would assume each question is independent of the others, so probably a T for ‘last’
That would be my guess too, but tbh that’s the only question I don’t feel confident about
And question 12, looks like the intent was below circle 3, but they put below circle 2. So is it a typo, or another intentionally ambiguous question where you can fail whoever you want?
Yeah, in the most pedantic sense, the correct answer is “a”, for “Louisiana”
“Oh, you’re black? Sorry, it was first L word in this undisclosed dictionary that we use for these tests”
Compared to rest of questions, the one doesn’t specify that the answer is contained in the sentence, By that logic, I’d say the first word is Louisiana.
That’s a perfect example of its ambiguousness; I read that as “the number below [this question]” and assumed I had to cross out enough zeros to make it 1,000,000.
It’s not supposed to be anything. There is no correct answer. The ambiguity is the point.
And 13 is unclear if it’s strictly ‘more than’ or ‘more than or equal’
That’s on purpose - white skin? it can be either one; otherwise both are wrong.
You actually weren’t subjected to literacy tests “if your grandfather was eligible to vote”, ie your grandfather was a white citizen.
I would always assume not more than or equal unless it says so
It says “more than”
It does, but in common language that could go either way. Especially since it’s not the technical phrase “greater than”.
No, twenty still isn’t more than twenty.
What’s interesting about the literacy tests is how much they have in common with IQ tests!
For example, a friend of mine remembers his childhood testing. For part of it a child is handed a set of cards and told to put them in order.
They have pictures of a set of blocks being assembled into a structure and the sun moves in an arc in the background.
Following the order implied by the sun is, apparently, wrong.
You got enough answers but here’s how you deny someone the right to vote: the question really means you need to make the number 1000000 exact as that is the number “below” the question. Not fewer, physically below.
Oh good, now we have three completely different answers
Four. You need to make the number below (less than) one million, so cross out zeros until it’s 100,000.
”0000000” isn’t a properly formatted number.It’s a fun game finding the ways you can tell someone whatever they said is wrong.
You cross out all of the 0s after the 1 and first 5 0s, so that the number is 100,000
Or you cross out just the 1
Six zeroes, right? Five zeroes makes one hundred thousand. Six makes a million. Or am I missing something?
You need to make it under one million
This is an example of the gotcha this test did, you can read the question two different ways. Making the number below the question one million, or making the number itself below one million.
Oh, Jesus. I read “below” to mean it was referring to the number directly “below” the instructions. I didn’t even consider that it could be read another way. Fuck everything about that test.
Shit, you’re right. It has 2 gotchas at least just in that one question
You need to cross out enough zeros so that it makes a million. Pretty sure
I mean purely pedantic, I have no idea the original test writers… but based on how I read the words
The number (one singular number needs to be crossed out)
Below one million, IE number < 1,000,000
So my conclusion
10000000000 < 1,000,000There is more than one right answer, which means there’s always a wrong answer to disqualify the target of prejudice from voting.
Ah, but they can get you because a bunch of zeros isn’t “a number”.
You could cross out the first 1000000… leaving just the last zero, though.
Cross 1, so it’s 0
I’d second this interpretation… least based on my interpretation of “cross out THE NUMBER”.
0 is a number.
1 is a digit in the number below
0 is not one million
0 is below 1 million
Read my comment again.
Also worth pointing out, WHY the test is so bad… 1. obviously not even well educated people today can agree on the meaning of a good portion of the questions.
but the biggest thing is, not everyone had to take them… IE the key point intention was “if a parent or grandparent has ever voted, you can skip this test”. which is such a blatant giving away that they don’t care of an individuals knowledge, they aren’t actually worried if they can read, they were just keeping first generation voters from voting… at a time when in particular a specific subset of american’s were in position to be first generation voters.
(black people, particularly)
There are two more pages to this and it gets worse
https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/aale/pdfs/Voter Test LA.pdf
This has the full thing and some explanation
Prove you’re literate by solving lateral thinking word puzzles.
This is like the kryptonite of autistic people… and black voters whenever they had this…
Um fuck you? Being autistic doesn’t mean we can’t circle a letter or understand a sentence. Hell, this shit is incredibly literal minded and is easy as hell for us. Maybe you’re the one with trouble…
You’re assuming that the grading system follows the “literal minded” definitions. On top of that, you better believe that they’ll make you do the test in a loud and overstimulating environment.
You don’t understand the test if you think it’s all literal and “about circling the letter.”
You would, in fact, get failed by the white eugenicists giving it to you the moment they figured out you were autistic.
One of the reasons they would know is that you think there are objectively correct answers to all of the questions and that most of them are not traps to allow a biased test giver to fail you and pass someone else that gave the same answer.
This test is clearly intended to be deceptive. For example, with Q1 should I circle the number ‘1’ or ‘a’? With Q4 how do you draw a line around something? 11 is clearly a trick question designed to put pressure on people.
I’m autistic and whilst I could confidently argue an answer for these questions, I’m pretty sure someone would disagree with the reasoning I use, and a single failure means I fail the test
Instructions unclear. Drew circle instead of line.
The point is they are not literal in any sense. Most of these questions can be interpreted at least 2 or more ways. I can’t even wrap my head around what question 1 even wants. It’s like word salad if you really read it carefully and literally.
I did my best. Do I get to vote?
Nope. The answer to number ten is ‘a’.
Assuming you went with “last”, but that starts with ‘l’, not ‘L’. Each other question also specifies “one this line” where relevant, but not this one. The first word starting with ‘L’ is “Louisiana”.
The trick of the test is that it’s subjective to the person grading it. I could have also told you that the line drawing one (12) was wrong by just saying it’s not the correct way to do it. Or that 11 was wrong because you didn’t make the number below one million, it’s equal to one million. Or if you crossed off one more zero I’d say you could have gotten fewer by crossing off the 1 at the start. Or that a long string of zeros isn’t a properly formatted number.
Aww, my suffrage. :(
Here’s a more straightforward test. Please share the RGB value from the site below that most closely matches your skin tone and I’ll let you know if you pass or fail.
rgba(46, 251, 217, 0.72)
You don’t get to vote but also you might need to see a doctor. I think you might have ingested way too much colloidal silver. Like this guy
You do not get to vote. You drew a curve for question 12 when the instructions specified a line.
Number 11 says, “cross out the number,” as in, only one number. Pretty sure you have to cross out “1” so that it’s just a bunch of zeros.
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@mkwt@lemmy.world @Blujayooo@lemmy.world
TIL I’m possibly partially (if not entirely) illiterate.
Starting with the first question, “Draw a line a_round_ the number or letter of this sentence.”, which can be ELI5’d as follows:
The main object is the number or letter of this sentence, which is the number or letter signaling the sentence, which is “1”, which is a number, so it’s the number of this sentence, “1”. This is fine.
The action being required is to “Draw a line around” the object, so, I must draw a line.
However, a line implies a straight line, while around implies a circle (which is round), so it must be a circle.
However, what’s around a circle isn’t called a line, it’s a circumference. And a circumference is made of infinitesimally small segments so small that they’re essentially an arc. And an arc is a segment insofar it effectively connects two points in a cartesian space with two dimensions or more… And a segment is essentially a finite range of a line, which is infinite…
The original question asks for a line, which is infinite. However, any physical object is finite insofar it has a limited, finite area, so a line couldn’t be drawn: what can be drawn is a segment whose length is less or equal to the largest diagonal of the said physical object, which is a rectangular paper, so drawing a line would be impossible, only segments comprising a circumference.
However, a physically-drawn segment can’t be infinitesimal insofar the thickness of the drawing tool would exceed the infinitesimality from an infinitesimal segment. It wouldn’t be a circumference, but a polygon with many sides.
So I must draw a polygon with enough sides to closely represent a circumference, composed by the smallest possible segments, which are finite lines.
However, the question asks for a line, and the English preposition a implies a single unit of something… but the said something can be a set (e.g. a flock, which implies many birds)… but line isn’t a set…
However, too many howevers.
So, if I decide to draw a circumference centered at the object (the number 1), as in circle the number, maybe it won’t be the line originally expected.
I could draw a box instead, which would technically be around it, and would be made of lines (four lines, to be exact). But, again, a line isn’t the same as lines, let alone four lines.
I could draw a single line, but it wouldn’t be around.
Maybe I could reinterpret the space. I could bend the paper and glue two opposing edges of it, so any segment would behave as a line, because the drawable space is now bent and both tips of the segment would meet seamlessly.
But the line wouldn’t be around the object, so the paper must be bent in a way that turns it into a cone whose tip is centered on the object, so a segment would become a line effectively around the object…
However, I got no glue.
/jk
The ambiguity was by design. It let the test proctor decide who did or did not pass with near impunity. This was used to legally deny voting rights to minorities.
@PaintedSnail@lemmy.world Yeah, I’m aware, my reply was an attempt to “Monty-Pythonize” the degree of absurdity from the questions 😆
Oh, well, carry on, then. Carry on.
It’s not working. We have relatively equal education in Germany, and we have plenty of intelligent, educated people voting far right.
“Educated” does not equal intelligent, and it certainly does not imply broad intelligence. You can train a relatively stupid human being to do all kinds of stuff and if you’ve ever worked with people with degrees you know what little value they carry.
I went to college and have white collar career and my family is largely university educated. I worked with structural engineers at my last job and half them were just barely able to do their jobs with the worst ones being the senior people. Elsewhere in the world there have been anti-vax doctors and nurses, psychotic therapists, and theologians who have read the bible who still do all the horrible things they definitely know are bullshit. I bet nearly half the people here on Lemmy know a software developer or three who shouldn’t ever touch a computer. People with degrees are more likely to be more intelligent but, especially while living in a world where they’re basically expected, that’s really just not a guarantee.
Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It’s not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.
We have govs and gobs and gobs of research that show that the best forward for everyone is cooperation. In fact, a lot of that research explicitly shows that the least ethical approaches are often the worst ones by nearly every metric except for “gives a handful of the wrong people way too much power”.
It’s like the four day work week and how we know it’s better not only for employee happiness but also for productivity and talent retention. We know that paying people fairly means that people can actually afford to buy the products we sell. We know that GDP is a bad measure of economic strength and that the most robust economies are those where a lot of smaller amounts change hands frequently. We as a species know all this, and anyone I would consider intelligent would have picked up on these patterns even if they weren’t explicitly told but they ARE being told, over and over again.
We need a new measure of what intelligence is but anything qualitative instead of quantitative is incredibly difficult for most people to grasp and they end worshipping the worst people who have stuff regardless of how they got it. I have the same diploma as my classmates and most of them shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near building design; pointing out my ability to graduate from a program even they could graduate from is not worth that much.
Intelligent people are not omniscient or universally unbiased. Just because they’re capable of doing a difficult job well, speak eloquently or excel in IQ tests doesn’t mean they won’t fall for political fallacies, aren’t xenophobic etc…
Being good at your little task, and in this case we’re talking about degrees so it’s just passing a couple courses and schmoozing your boss afterward, does not make you intelligent. I know some profoundly stupid people who barely scrape by, many by just overworking themselves because they lack the ability to grow and learn new, better ways to do things on their own.
The bar for “intelligent” is on the fucking floor, apparently.
Sure, keep believing that “truly intelligent” people are immune to fascism. There’s no way that will ever come back to bite you!
Yup. Same in the States.
People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.
Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn’t guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they’re clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.
Arguably the educated and intelligent are more likely to profit from fascism (to an extent), anyway - they’re going to do the oppressing, while most workers are going to be on the ‘being oppressed’ side.
Are they very educated then?
Keep trying, Jay. One day you’ll make a funny comic.
Idunno I thought the burning coal one was kinda funny
Ironically illiterate take
Maybe the author was aware of it being a bad idea but didn’t really emphasize that only an exclusive group would pick our leaders.
Judging from the rest of this author’s work, I highly doubt they thought about this any deeper than a puddle.
Okay buddy cryptofash rhetoric
You sure do love calling people fascist, you’ve done it multiple times today.
Just people like you, for some reason.
This is a bit reminiscent of Trump’s “everything I don’t like is fake news” routine.
whoosh
Said the guy who just said “Maybe the author created pro-fascist propaganda he doesn’t actually agree with on accident.”
To further clear things up, I’m referring to your personal and extensive posting history of fascist or fascist-leanimg rhetoric.
Not that I doubt you consider yourself an enlightened centrist.
Lol, I bet you’re some kind of Tankie or a Trump supporter.
Fascinating leap of logic. Anarchist btw.
Didn’t deny it, I notice. Weird how your kind can never quite bring themselves to do that.
If you’re anarchist then why do you get so mad when I insult your glorious dictatorship?
You’re the only person here taking a defensive stance for authoritarians, your claims don’t hold enough water to bother poking holes in.
It is 100% used as a weapon to disenfranchise voters.
I do however believe that it should be used on CANDIDATES.
Every single candidate should be made to pass a basic grade 8 biology exam.
Who gets to design the test, though?
Me.
You have my vote, but only if you pass MY OWN candidate tester test.
Mexican exam-off
That is the one fear, especially considering… a now controlling amount of politicians can’t accept basic facts… so we’d see questions like “is climate change real”, “how old is the earth”.
The test will ask how old the Earth is. Any answer over 6000 years or so will be marked false.
Anyone who solves a millennium prize problem earns the right to vote.
I think it should be a coin flip. Heads or tails. You lose whichever way it lands. That’ll keep the riffraff out.
AI.
Fight me.
While the idea of being required to pass a test to be eligible is bad for the reasons others have given, I do like the idea of having to take a test in order to run. No pass/fail, but the results are made public so we know who we’re voting for. Make it a random compilation pulled from the state testing from each state, or something. With a large enough data set, we should be able to prevent people gaming the system.
Cue Cletus declaring that Obama failed it but Trump passed
InB4 the Non-Voters just start doing the Wilmington Massacre repeatedly.
Check your history books about what happens when the majority of the population has no political voice. Things get ugly.
