7 ms·

Unfortunately I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that a large percentage of people across the political spectrum lack basic civics knowledge.

mjevans 6y ago
We make people take a test to drive. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 6y ago
  We don't have tests because they were specifically used to disenfranchise large classes of people in the past.
  - davmar 6y ago
    precisely. literacy tests are banned by the civil rights act.
  - hammock 6y ago
    Ironic that you have to point this out to someone who is arguing that people lack civics knowledge..
    - zo1 6y ago
      Exactly... If anything, this "test" will disenfranchise the claimed "uninformed" "Trump supporters".
- awb 6y ago
  > People should have to take a Civics based test to vote 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.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    This is implicit in the continued public education (as a job) requirement of suspending the voting rights; whatever a current public education consists of. Thus they might have to train up to, at least during the initial test, currently, what a high-school civics test final would be. During the time in (comprehensive) public education that would also be a job they are paid a living wage for. I view (non-broken-window) investment in civel infrastructure as a net good; this includes the education of the people and each individual person.
    - awb 6y ago
      > what a high-school civics test final would be 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.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Ironically you're failing my civics test here, because you seem unaware that tests as a precondition of voting are unconstitutional because they were used for a century to deny black people the right to vote. You real don't want to go down this road: It leads to wide scale targeted voter suppression.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I am aware of that, which is why I expressly stated a related condition of restoring those person's rights as citizens by linking the temporary suspension of those rights to continued education (remediation of the citizen being failed by the state).
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      You're still failing the civics test, as you don't seem to be aware that the entire point of the poll tests was never to actually test anything, but rather to serve as a pretext to deny people their constitutionally guaranteed voting rights. You can't "fix" this problem by offering remediation measures that would be immediately coopted by exactly the same actors to exactly the same goal. All the continuing education would be is a waste of time and money for the targeted people going through it, as some excuse would still be found to deny their voting rights at the end of it. Do not underestimate the lengths that people will go to for voter suppression. You can't design a program that won't be intentionally warped and abused to serve this ulterior motive, especially considering that you won't be running it; they will be. 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.
      - mjevans 6y ago
        I agree the War on Drugs is really a voter and general population suppression effort. However while __historically__ what you say did happen, and I do NOT deny it happened, I DISAGREE that it forever bans a properly implemented system that includes true empowerment of an informed and well educated voting population. For what I want to see, again, refer to my original post.
- msla 6y ago
  Here's an example of a question on a real poll test: 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 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.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Wouldn't that first requiring proof of voter identification? I'm sure plenty of Trump supporters would be down with this plan.
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea, as long as you make it really cheap (ideally free) and convenient to get one. If republicans were actually interested in election integrity and civic participation, they wouldn't keep accidentally forgetting that part. But they're not, so in practice it ends up acting as a tool for discrimination and disenfranchisement.
    - kepler1 6y ago
      >The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea... 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?
      - zo1 6y ago
        There really is something seriously fishy with how "Voter ID" is being fought against and dismissed. Here you have a nearly 100% effective method of silencing the complaints of the "not accepting the fair election result" Republicans, and yet no one wants to explore it. Not only that, but it might even serve to promote participation and ease of voting, yet still... we get nebulous and down-right dismissive reasons why it can't be put in place.
- dboreham 6y ago
  The Honda Civics test.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  Why don't you try ensuring that everybody votes? Seems to work for Australia. You end up with politicians who are interested in appealing to the broadest range of voters rather than trying to make it difficult for the people who would vote against them to vote. 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.
- craftinator 6y ago
  > People should have to take a Civics based test to 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.

mjevans 6y ago

We make people take a test to drive. 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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
monocasa 6y ago
We don't have tests because they were specifically used to disenfranchise large classes of people in the past.
- davmar 6y ago
  precisely. literacy tests are banned by the civil rights act.
- hammock 6y ago
  Ironic that you have to point this out to someone who is arguing that people lack civics knowledge..
  - zo1 6y ago
    Exactly... If anything, this "test" will disenfranchise the claimed "uninformed" "Trump supporters".
awb 6y ago
> People should have to take a Civics based test to vote 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.
- mjevans 6y ago
  This is implicit in the continued public education (as a job) requirement of suspending the voting rights; whatever a current public education consists of. Thus they might have to train up to, at least during the initial test, currently, what a high-school civics test final would be. During the time in (comprehensive) public education that would also be a job they are paid a living wage for. I view (non-broken-window) investment in civel infrastructure as a net good; this includes the education of the people and each individual person.
  - awb 6y ago
    > what a high-school civics test final would be 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.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Ironically you're failing my civics test here, because you seem unaware that tests as a precondition of voting are unconstitutional because they were used for a century to deny black people the right to vote. You real don't want to go down this road: It leads to wide scale targeted voter suppression.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I am aware of that, which is why I expressly stated a related condition of restoring those person's rights as citizens by linking the temporary suspension of those rights to continued education (remediation of the citizen being failed by the state).
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    You're still failing the civics test, as you don't seem to be aware that the entire point of the poll tests was never to actually test anything, but rather to serve as a pretext to deny people their constitutionally guaranteed voting rights. You can't "fix" this problem by offering remediation measures that would be immediately coopted by exactly the same actors to exactly the same goal. All the continuing education would be is a waste of time and money for the targeted people going through it, as some excuse would still be found to deny their voting rights at the end of it. Do not underestimate the lengths that people will go to for voter suppression. You can't design a program that won't be intentionally warped and abused to serve this ulterior motive, especially considering that you won't be running it; they will be. 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.
    - mjevans 6y ago
      I agree the War on Drugs is really a voter and general population suppression effort. However while __historically__ what you say did happen, and I do NOT deny it happened, I DISAGREE that it forever bans a properly implemented system that includes true empowerment of an informed and well educated voting population. For what I want to see, again, refer to my original post.
msla 6y ago
Here's an example of a question on a real poll test: 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 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.
lliamander 6y ago
Wouldn't that first requiring proof of voter identification? I'm sure plenty of Trump supporters would be down with this plan.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea, as long as you make it really cheap (ideally free) and convenient to get one. If republicans were actually interested in election integrity and civic participation, they wouldn't keep accidentally forgetting that part. But they're not, so in practice it ends up acting as a tool for discrimination and disenfranchisement.
  - kepler1 6y ago
    >The thing about voter ID is that it isn't inherently a bad idea... 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?
    - zo1 6y ago
      There really is something seriously fishy with how "Voter ID" is being fought against and dismissed. Here you have a nearly 100% effective method of silencing the complaints of the "not accepting the fair election result" Republicans, and yet no one wants to explore it. Not only that, but it might even serve to promote participation and ease of voting, yet still... we get nebulous and down-right dismissive reasons why it can't be put in place.
dboreham 6y ago
The Honda Civics test.
dragonsky 6y ago
Why don't you try ensuring that everybody votes? Seems to work for Australia. You end up with politicians who are interested in appealing to the broadest range of voters rather than trying to make it difficult for the people who would vote against them to vote. 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.
craftinator 6y ago
> People should have to take a Civics based test to 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.