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Note: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm: > [NOT

Note: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm: > [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.] Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf

InvaderFizz 2y ago
[flagged]
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  It may be from after 1942 and the "correct" answer is simply wrong.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > That literacy test seems reasonable Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.
    - M4v3R 2y ago
      In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times. What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
        alexey-salmin 2y ago
        > you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote. Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public? I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.
        pmontra 2y ago
        You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.
- VariousPrograms 2y ago
  It's definitely not reasonable. You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. There are lots of likely-disqualifiers mixed in with the gimmes like "Who is the first president?".
  - whaaaaat 2y ago
    Agreed. This test is not reasonable. Even "who is the first president" knowledge shouldn't be a bar to voting. Do you think they offered this literacy test in the native languages of all taking it? Do you think all people in the US had the opportunity to learn, in their language, the history of the country? At the time there were systemic barriers to education that meant that many folk were probably not even taught who the first president was. Let alone how old you have to be to be president.
    - butlike 2y ago
      There's also a few typographical issues I noticed that might have been an issue for uneducated folk. For instance, in one question, government is written as "governm ent" What's a government ENT?
  - w0de0 2y ago
    Few people know that the first president was Peyton Randolph.
    - cafard 2y ago
      Not John Hanson?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. That isn't actually all that clear cut. I'd agree that it is probably a bad idea, but there is potential that the results would be better if voters understood the system that they were delivering instructions into.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  I like the abstract idea of literacy tests but then I also think some questions in this particular literacy test is unnecessarily tricky. And some could be considered historical trivia. The commerce question is supposed to be answered by reading the constitution by itself, not by reading SCOTUS opinions. So this is different from actual constitutional scholars. That makes this question unsuitable for literacy tests. At a minimum: I think people should be given ample time to complete a literacy test, at a date and time chosen by the test taker, and also have multiple attempts available. And for the content of the test, they should have actual elementary school students attempt it to make sure it isn't too difficult.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    A literacy test in which language?
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      All languages as long as a translator could be found and hired by the government. Of course the cost of hiring the translator and doing the translation should be borne by the government. A multi-language literacy test also forces the test writer to write questions that are language agnostic. No more things like "spell this word" or "circle the longest word" as seen in the article.
tptacek 2y ago
This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.uscourts.gov/200th/notablecases/40%20Louisiana%20-%20EDLA.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...
- nneonneo 2y ago
  The original Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-the-supreme-court-the-impossible-literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-give-black-voters.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t... The follow-up, in which the author chronicles their (unsuccessful) search for an original: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-test-update-the-hunt-for-the-original-document.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-.... The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushistory.pbworks.com/f/Louisiana+Literacy+Test.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Right, and you'd assume that if it was widely delivered in Louisiana, there'd be contemporaneous records; what that test is doing is pretty obvious.
    - relaxing 2y ago
      Why would you assume that?
Uhhrrr 2y ago
It's interesting that the Slate and crmvet pieces have updates about the search for authenticity, but this piece published today doesn't mention it.
- tptacek 2y ago
  It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.
  - Uhhrrr 2y ago
    I think it's surprising because the piece is new and it links to the Slate and crmvet articles.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Right, but they're rehashing coverage they had of this exact test 10 years ago.
_zagj 2y ago
This one seems deliberately difficult to answer correctly, even with the requisite civics knowledge: > The President of the Senate gets his office > a. by election by the people. > b. by election by the Senate. > c. by appointment by the President. The Vice President is the President of the Senate, but the duties are typically exercised (save the tie-breaking vote) by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a Senator chosen by whichever party currently has a majority. It seems both a. and b. could be considered correct.
- silisili 2y ago
  I'd argue even C could be seen as correct. The president chooses his running mate, after all.
  - kadoban 2y ago
    C is also literally what happens if a new VP is needed for any reason (needs to get confirmed by Congress though).
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I'd say C is the only correct answer actually. Neither the President nor his running mate are elected by the people; they're elected by the Electoral College. And the question isn't about the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
      - silisili 2y ago
        I think that's the point of these questions, to have no clear answer. So a presidential candidate picks a vice president running mate. Voters vote for the pair. The electoral college then, usually but not always, cast votes matching the voters. So who decided? Technically the electoral college. Who were guided by the voters. Who voted for someone the president picked.
        cedilla 2y ago
trukledeitz 2y ago
Agreed, from my limited web research the actual existence of use of this document has been questioned for many years. This is not a new topic, or a new artifact. I've found references to this verbiage going back as far as the 1960's. Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time. Speaking to many of the outraged commenters, Do you think that the example test is a reasonable analog of any state's voting process currently in use? If not, do you think an analog of this test could be enacted legally under current legal statutes? If so, what additional changes would you propose to supplement current statutes?
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time. The protection took a major hit in 2013, when the US Supreme court made a 5-4 decision in Shelby vs. Holder [0], permitting some areas to (re-)start a strategy of imposing unconstitutional and discriminatory laws just before an election, with local authorities knowing that any court-case voiding their law can't arrive in time to matter. Then they just enact the same kind of discriminatory law before the next major election, over and over, with no real punishment. While state legislatures aren't currently choosing to enact things quite as blatant as before, the same exploit makes it possible. [0] https://www.naacpldf.org/shelby-county-v-holder-impact/ https://www.naacpldf.org/shelby-county-v-holder-impact/
  - trukledeitz 2y ago
    Thank you for including a link for reference. I may have missed some substance in the article, so help me out if I missed it. For my part, I'm not sure that the court would make additions to law, but maybe they should have allowed an option for Congress to update the law so that section 4 applied to all states? I can see that if you view section 4 of the VRA to be an important construct for citizen voting protections, nation wide application of the statute would only further protect the populace...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zahlman 2y ago
The Stack Exchange community seems to have concluded that it is not authentic: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57431/in-1964-were-some-prospective-voters-in-louisiana-asked-to-spell-backwards-fo https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57431/in-1964-w...

InvaderFizz 2y ago

[flagged]

edflsafoiewq 2y ago
It may be from after 1942 and the "correct" answer is simply wrong.
kelnos 2y ago
> That literacy test seems reasonable Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.
  - M4v3R 2y ago
    In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times. What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
      - alexey-salmin 2y ago
        > you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote. Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public? I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.
        pmontra 2y ago
        You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.
VariousPrograms 2y ago
It's definitely not reasonable. You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. There are lots of likely-disqualifiers mixed in with the gimmes like "Who is the first president?".
- whaaaaat 2y ago
  Agreed. This test is not reasonable. Even "who is the first president" knowledge shouldn't be a bar to voting. Do you think they offered this literacy test in the native languages of all taking it? Do you think all people in the US had the opportunity to learn, in their language, the history of the country? At the time there were systemic barriers to education that meant that many folk were probably not even taught who the first president was. Let alone how old you have to be to be president.
  - butlike 2y ago
    There's also a few typographical issues I noticed that might have been an issue for uneducated folk. For instance, in one question, government is written as "governm ent" What's a government ENT?
- w0de0 2y ago
  Few people know that the first president was Peyton Randolph.
  - cafard 2y ago
    Not John Hanson?
- roenxi 2y ago
  > You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. That isn't actually all that clear cut. I'd agree that it is probably a bad idea, but there is potential that the results would be better if voters understood the system that they were delivering instructions into.
kccqzy 2y ago
I like the abstract idea of literacy tests but then I also think some questions in this particular literacy test is unnecessarily tricky. And some could be considered historical trivia. The commerce question is supposed to be answered by reading the constitution by itself, not by reading SCOTUS opinions. So this is different from actual constitutional scholars. That makes this question unsuitable for literacy tests. At a minimum: I think people should be given ample time to complete a literacy test, at a date and time chosen by the test taker, and also have multiple attempts available. And for the content of the test, they should have actual elementary school students attempt it to make sure it isn't too difficult.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  A literacy test in which language?
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    All languages as long as a translator could be found and hired by the government. Of course the cost of hiring the translator and doing the translation should be borne by the government. A multi-language literacy test also forces the test writer to write questions that are language agnostic. No more things like "spell this word" or "circle the longest word" as seen in the article.

tptacek 2y ago

This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.uscourts.gov/200th/notablecases/40%20Louisiana%20-%20EDLA.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...

nneonneo 2y ago
The original Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-the-supreme-court-the-impossible-literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-give-black-voters.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t... The follow-up, in which the author chronicles their (unsuccessful) search for an original: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-test-update-the-hunt-for-the-original-document.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-.... The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushistory.pbworks.com/f/Louisiana+Literacy+Test.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")
- tptacek 2y ago
  Right, and you'd assume that if it was widely delivered in Louisiana, there'd be contemporaneous records; what that test is doing is pretty obvious.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    Why would you assume that?

Uhhrrr 2y ago

It's interesting that the Slate and crmvet pieces have updates about the search for authenticity, but this piece published today doesn't mention it.

tptacek 2y ago
It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.
- Uhhrrr 2y ago
  I think it's surprising because the piece is new and it links to the Slate and crmvet articles.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Right, but they're rehashing coverage they had of this exact test 10 years ago.

_zagj 2y ago

This one seems deliberately difficult to answer correctly, even with the requisite civics knowledge: > The President of the Senate gets his office > a. by election by the people. > b. by election by the Senate. > c. by appointment by the President. The Vice President is the President of the Senate, but the duties are typically exercised (save the tie-breaking vote) by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a Senator chosen by whichever party currently has a majority. It seems both a. and b. could be considered correct.

silisili 2y ago
I'd argue even C could be seen as correct. The president chooses his running mate, after all.
- kadoban 2y ago
  C is also literally what happens if a new VP is needed for any reason (needs to get confirmed by Congress though).
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I'd say C is the only correct answer actually. Neither the President nor his running mate are elected by the people; they're elected by the Electoral College. And the question isn't about the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
    - silisili 2y ago
      I think that's the point of these questions, to have no clear answer. So a presidential candidate picks a vice president running mate. Voters vote for the pair. The electoral college then, usually but not always, cast votes matching the voters. So who decided? Technically the electoral college. Who were guided by the voters. Who voted for someone the president picked.
      - cedilla 2y ago

trukledeitz 2y ago

Agreed, from my limited web research the actual existence of use of this document has been questioned for many years. This is not a new topic, or a new artifact. I've found references to this verbiage going back as far as the 1960's. Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time. Speaking to many of the outraged commenters, Do you think that the example test is a reasonable analog of any state's voting process currently in use? If not, do you think an analog of this test could be enacted legally under current legal statutes? If so, what additional changes would you propose to supplement current statutes?

Terr_ 2y ago
> Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time. The protection took a major hit in 2013, when the US Supreme court made a 5-4 decision in Shelby vs. Holder [0], permitting some areas to (re-)start a strategy of imposing unconstitutional and discriminatory laws just before an election, with local authorities knowing that any court-case voiding their law can't arrive in time to matter. Then they just enact the same kind of discriminatory law before the next major election, over and over, with no real punishment. While state legislatures aren't currently choosing to enact things quite as blatant as before, the same exploit makes it possible. [0] https://www.naacpldf.org/shelby-county-v-holder-impact/ https://www.naacpldf.org/shelby-county-v-holder-impact/
- trukledeitz 2y ago
  Thank you for including a link for reference. I may have missed some substance in the article, so help me out if I missed it. For my part, I'm not sure that the court would make additions to law, but maybe they should have allowed an option for Congress to update the law so that section 4 applied to all states? I can see that if you view section 4 of the VRA to be an important construct for citizen voting protections, nation wide application of the statute would only further protect the populace...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zahlman 2y ago

The Stack Exchange community seems to have concluded that it is not authentic: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57431/in-1964-were-some-prospective-voters-in-louisiana-asked-to-spell-backwards-fo https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57431/in-1964-w...