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Places have tried this (look up the history of "literacy tests"), and it mostly functioned as a mechanism to discriminate against voters of certain classes. Lo

Places have tried this (look up the history of "literacy tests"), and it mostly functioned as a mechanism to discriminate against voters of certain classes. Long term, if you have a test to vote and, say, people somewhere don't tend to vote the way you like, but you have control of the funding for their education system, it's easy enough to make decisions that net reduce that population's ability to vote.

core-questions 6y ago
> it mostly functioned as a mechanism to discriminate against voters of certain classes Well, we can set the bar wherever we like; the question was ultimately "can we have a bar at all". Since some people seem to think that even asking for ID is too high of a bar, it's clear to me that there's a market into catering to extremely-low-information voters; not that anyone is every going to _do_ a damned thing for them, but you can certainly make hollow promises easily enough. An alternate requirement if we want a higher bar than an academic test would be to require that one own land and have children before you're allowed to vote, or something like that. Perhaps a combination of alternatives could be offered. The question I'm really trying to ask is whether it's at all reasonable to do something to increase the quality of the vote.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  >The question I'm really trying to ask is whether it's at all reasonable to do something to increase the quality of the vote. Absolutely. I'm 100% for programs to promote literacy and civic education. Reduce corporate political financing so that politicians _have to_ appeal to their constituencies. Increase the density of elected representatives so that each representative has a constituency small enough for them to actually reasonably represent.