5 ms·

I think his proposal to bar people under 25 from voting unless they pass a civics test is pretty bad.

epgui 3y ago
I don’t know anything about the proposal or the person, but on its own, this seems like a prima facie great idea to me (in theory).
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  Really? If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 (he hasn't proposed that one for some reason). Ironically enough, Vivek himself might fail the test (that he wouldn't have to take given his age), seeing as he seems to think the Constitution was ratified before the end of the Revolutionary War.[0] Given that, I wouldn't trust him to write such a test, or to appoint people to write one. So who exactly would write the test? [0]https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/vivek-ramaswamy-republican-debate-civics-test-fail-rcna101625 https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/vivek-ramaswa...
  - cheeseomlit 3y ago
    >If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 Both those things sound good to me, though applying it universally to all ages would be preferred. And I wouldn't characterize it as 'arbitrary' necessarily- I think that if you let everyone vote without any pre-requisites at all your democratic process inevitably becomes a carnival sideshow, a shallow popularity contest where the win condition is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some baseline level of knowledge in the constituency would be a big improvement, even if we still have the unavoidable problem of 'who determines the pre-requisites' to grapple with. Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about Vivek or any of his other positions, and this is obviously just a partisan talking point for him. But that doesn't mean the core problem being identified doesn't exist
    - calgarymicro 3y ago
      A lack of civic knowledge among the populace is a failure of the education system, not the people themselves. If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore. 85%[0] of Americans don't know when the Constitution was written; 61% of Americans don't know the three branches of government.[1] Barring well over half of Americans from voting would not end well. [0]https://woodrow.org/news/how-well-americans-know-constitution/ https://woodrow.org/news/how-well-americans-know-constitutio... [1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/americans-know-more-about-civics-but-numbers-still-dismally-low-researchers-say/2019/09 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/americans-know-more...
      - cheeseomlit 3y ago
        They don't know these things because they don't care to know, there's no other excuse when you're living in the information age. You don't need a teacher to tell you how many branches of government there are. I agree that it's a massive failure of the education system, but not solely- there's plenty of blame to go around. In practice I don't think 85% of Americans would be unqualified based on those stats, those numbers would improve dramatically if the incentive were there (IE. know these things or don't vote). >If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore. I see your point but I don't consider democracy to be a binary condition, it exists in degrees- IE. voting directly for policies vs. electing representatives to do so, etc. If one were barred from democratic participation on a permanent basis for reasons they have no control over, IE. Race/Sex, then yes democratic principles have been violated. But if all they have to do is learn some basic facts about the history of the institution they are participating in, I don't see that as 'not letting' them vote. It's more 'if you really care about voting you'll do some basic due diligence first'.
        calgarymicro 3y ago
  - epgui 3y ago
    > If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 I would agree that this is a prima facie good idea. I would say that it would be a prima facie good idea for all ages.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      One would have to be pretty ignorant of history to think this would in practice be a good idea. In reality these tests would be abused to ensure certain voting populations would have a lower rate of representation. https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voice/keeping-vote/state-rules-federal-rules/literacy-tests https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voi...
      - epgui 3y ago
        Bad implementations shouldn’t prevent you from toying with an idea in theory in your head. That’s just a failure of the imagination (in many cases).
        vel0city 3y ago
        But its not just a bad implementation that led to abuse, its practically every implementation was a bad implementation that led to abuse. See the White Australia policy and the Franchise and Ballot Act in South Africa for even more examples. Got any examples where such an action was actually a good thing for society and not just to repress minorities? I could probably continue coming up with more with enough thinking about it and reading history. But hey, feel free to continue arguing for policies which historically were only implemented to suppress minorities. I'm sure it'll all go well this time.
        omniglottal 3y ago
        "Toying with an idea" is fundamentally considering its real world implementation unless your toy idea is intended to only ever be just fantasy.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  We fought an entire war over "no taxation without representation".
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > We fought an entire war over "no taxation without representation". We fought an entire war where that was one of a very long list of cited grievances, and even then it was about regional representation in the legislature, not broad franchise within the represented region. However, poll tests have their own sordid history after that point in this country, and limiting them by age doesn’t change the fundamental problem that they had before, in that they have always been a method for government to fail a population and then disenfranchise them, justifying it on the basis of (the natural consequences of) that failure.
- vore 3y ago
  Who writes the test? Who determines what questions are “right” or “wrong” on the test? Why should someone have to take a test to have the now-privilege of determining who has power over them?
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    Exactly this and even a step further, who grades the test to determine which ballots to throw out? If the test is in anyway free-form then the hanging chads debate gets to happen at every polling station, forever
- dangerwill 3y ago
  Any arbitrary test that is used to gate access to enfranchisement will be used by politicians to try to chose their voters. This was all fought over during the civil rights period and is simply a means to screw over the other side. https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test this shows the kind of bullshit tests that would be created if Ramaswamy gets his way
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I agree that it is prima facie a good idea but--just like throwing water onto a grease-fire--our first instincts are not always the best. :P One big problem is that a good implementation/grading of "civics" test is so subjective that it could easily become a political-weapon to disenfranchise voters depending on who writes or grades the tests. Heck, you can already see it starting: The reason those politicians want to give free-pass to anyone over 25 is because their voting-base skews older, and they want any disenfranchisement to fall more-heavily against the other party. [0][1] Similarly, "literacy tests" were horribly abused within US history, despite in theory being something that should be much easier to make a fair test for. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/20/the-lopsided-age-distribution-of-partisan-politics-visualized/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/20/t... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/pp_2023-07-12_validated-voters_2-03/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patte...
irrational 3y ago
First let’s have US politicians try to pass such a test.
cultofmetatron 3y ago
> people under 25 from voting unless they pass a civics test having seen interviews of trump supporters, I think it would be a good idea to require a civics test for everyone. There are way too many people with a tenuous grasp of reality that vote. then again, "qualification tests" have been used historically to silence marginalized voices so its one of those damned either way situations.
- 6510 3y ago
  My version of the test was to have each candidate pick 3 issues and provide their desired solution (where solutions may be vague: negotiate X, investigate X etc) Each voter must be able to pick names of the candidates and which issues they chose in a multiple choice test. (I would also like it if people got some money for passing the test as I suspect the people not voting and the most uninformed voters could really use some money.) The point is simple, if we need you to chose you need to know which choices you have. It is not more but less democratic if you chose randomly.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  A far-less-dangerous option would be to make it an educational requirement in schools. Focus on increasing the qualifications of the citizenry without making it a hard-requirement to vote. Anecdotally, my school had a 1-semester Specific History Of This State that all freshmen had to take and probably forgot, plus an seemingly-inordinate amount of time spent on the exact dates and locations of Civil War battles. Instead, imagine if some of that time/instruction was set aside for practical civics, including tricks like wrecking amendments [0] or weaknesses of plurality voting like the spoiler effect. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting
- bradknowles 3y ago
  Any civics test will become a Jim Crow test and be abused to strip people of the right to vote who don't have the right color skin, or belong to the right political party, or whatever. I agree that all politicians should need to pass a civics test, but I disagree that it should be a law. Instead, they should be laughed out of the country -- but not as a law.

I don’t know anything about the proposal or the person, but on its own, this seems like a prima facie great idea to me (in theory).

calgarymicro 3y ago
Really? If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 (he hasn't proposed that one for some reason). Ironically enough, Vivek himself might fail the test (that he wouldn't have to take given his age), seeing as he seems to think the Constitution was ratified before the end of the Revolutionary War.[0] Given that, I wouldn't trust him to write such a test, or to appoint people to write one. So who exactly would write the test? [0]https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/vivek-ramaswamy-republican-debate-civics-test-fail-rcna101625 https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/vivek-ramaswa...
- cheeseomlit 3y ago
  >If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 Both those things sound good to me, though applying it universally to all ages would be preferred. And I wouldn't characterize it as 'arbitrary' necessarily- I think that if you let everyone vote without any pre-requisites at all your democratic process inevitably becomes a carnival sideshow, a shallow popularity contest where the win condition is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some baseline level of knowledge in the constituency would be a big improvement, even if we still have the unavoidable problem of 'who determines the pre-requisites' to grapple with. Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about Vivek or any of his other positions, and this is obviously just a partisan talking point for him. But that doesn't mean the core problem being identified doesn't exist
  - calgarymicro 3y ago
    A lack of civic knowledge among the populace is a failure of the education system, not the people themselves. If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore. 85%[0] of Americans don't know when the Constitution was written; 61% of Americans don't know the three branches of government.[1] Barring well over half of Americans from voting would not end well. [0]https://woodrow.org/news/how-well-americans-know-constitution/ https://woodrow.org/news/how-well-americans-know-constitutio... [1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/americans-know-more-about-civics-but-numbers-still-dismally-low-researchers-say/2019/09 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/americans-know-more...
    - cheeseomlit 3y ago
      They don't know these things because they don't care to know, there's no other excuse when you're living in the information age. You don't need a teacher to tell you how many branches of government there are. I agree that it's a massive failure of the education system, but not solely- there's plenty of blame to go around. In practice I don't think 85% of Americans would be unqualified based on those stats, those numbers would improve dramatically if the incentive were there (IE. know these things or don't vote). >If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore. I see your point but I don't consider democracy to be a binary condition, it exists in degrees- IE. voting directly for policies vs. electing representatives to do so, etc. If one were barred from democratic participation on a permanent basis for reasons they have no control over, IE. Race/Sex, then yes democratic principles have been violated. But if all they have to do is learn some basic facts about the history of the institution they are participating in, I don't see that as 'not letting' them vote. It's more 'if you really care about voting you'll do some basic due diligence first'.
      - calgarymicro 3y ago
- epgui 3y ago
  > If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 I would agree that this is a prima facie good idea. I would say that it would be a prima facie good idea for all ages.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    One would have to be pretty ignorant of history to think this would in practice be a good idea. In reality these tests would be abused to ensure certain voting populations would have a lower rate of representation. https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voice/keeping-vote/state-rules-federal-rules/literacy-tests https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voi...
    - epgui 3y ago
      Bad implementations shouldn’t prevent you from toying with an idea in theory in your head. That’s just a failure of the imagination (in many cases).
      - vel0city 3y ago
        But its not just a bad implementation that led to abuse, its practically every implementation was a bad implementation that led to abuse. See the White Australia policy and the Franchise and Ballot Act in South Africa for even more examples. Got any examples where such an action was actually a good thing for society and not just to repress minorities? I could probably continue coming up with more with enough thinking about it and reading history. But hey, feel free to continue arguing for policies which historically were only implemented to suppress minorities. I'm sure it'll all go well this time.
      - omniglottal 3y ago
        "Toying with an idea" is fundamentally considering its real world implementation unless your toy idea is intended to only ever be just fantasy.
ceejayoz 3y ago
We fought an entire war over "no taxation without representation".
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > We fought an entire war over "no taxation without representation". We fought an entire war where that was one of a very long list of cited grievances, and even then it was about regional representation in the legislature, not broad franchise within the represented region. However, poll tests have their own sordid history after that point in this country, and limiting them by age doesn’t change the fundamental problem that they had before, in that they have always been a method for government to fail a population and then disenfranchise them, justifying it on the basis of (the natural consequences of) that failure.
vore 3y ago
Who writes the test? Who determines what questions are “right” or “wrong” on the test? Why should someone have to take a test to have the now-privilege of determining who has power over them?
- dangerwill 3y ago
  Exactly this and even a step further, who grades the test to determine which ballots to throw out? If the test is in anyway free-form then the hanging chads debate gets to happen at every polling station, forever
dangerwill 3y ago
Any arbitrary test that is used to gate access to enfranchisement will be used by politicians to try to chose their voters. This was all fought over during the civil rights period and is simply a means to screw over the other side. https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test this shows the kind of bullshit tests that would be created if Ramaswamy gets his way
Terr_ 3y ago
I agree that it is prima facie a good idea but--just like throwing water onto a grease-fire--our first instincts are not always the best. :P One big problem is that a good implementation/grading of "civics" test is so subjective that it could easily become a political-weapon to disenfranchise voters depending on who writes or grades the tests. Heck, you can already see it starting: The reason those politicians want to give free-pass to anyone over 25 is because their voting-base skews older, and they want any disenfranchisement to fall more-heavily against the other party. [0][1] Similarly, "literacy tests" were horribly abused within US history, despite in theory being something that should be much easier to make a fair test for. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/20/the-lopsided-age-distribution-of-partisan-politics-visualized/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/20/t... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/pp_2023-07-12_validated-voters_2-03/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patte...

irrational 3y ago

First let’s have US politicians try to pass such a test.

cultofmetatron 3y ago

> people under 25 from voting unless they pass a civics test having seen interviews of trump supporters, I think it would be a good idea to require a civics test for everyone. There are way too many people with a tenuous grasp of reality that vote. then again, "qualification tests" have been used historically to silence marginalized voices so its one of those damned either way situations.

6510 3y ago
My version of the test was to have each candidate pick 3 issues and provide their desired solution (where solutions may be vague: negotiate X, investigate X etc) Each voter must be able to pick names of the candidates and which issues they chose in a multiple choice test. (I would also like it if people got some money for passing the test as I suspect the people not voting and the most uninformed voters could really use some money.) The point is simple, if we need you to chose you need to know which choices you have. It is not more but less democratic if you chose randomly.
Terr_ 3y ago
A far-less-dangerous option would be to make it an educational requirement in schools. Focus on increasing the qualifications of the citizenry without making it a hard-requirement to vote. Anecdotally, my school had a 1-semester Specific History Of This State that all freshmen had to take and probably forgot, plus an seemingly-inordinate amount of time spent on the exact dates and locations of Civil War battles. Instead, imagine if some of that time/instruction was set aside for practical civics, including tricks like wrecking amendments [0] or weaknesses of plurality voting like the spoiler effect. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_amendment [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting
bradknowles 3y ago
Any civics test will become a Jim Crow test and be abused to strip people of the right to vote who don't have the right color skin, or belong to the right political party, or whatever. I agree that all politicians should need to pass a civics test, but I disagree that it should be a law. Instead, they should be laughed out of the country -- but not as a law.