this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Who determines the questions and answers? Now they are the ones determining who can vote and thus the people in control.
Still a better system than your electoral college.
No. Its just another tool used to be racist and reduce minority votes.
We dont have to guess or assume. It already happened and thats what it was for.
Its not a better system. If you want to pretend though... you can at most say its the same.
Not even close. And I find it racist of you to assume that a minority is somehow incapable of passing an exam.
I'm begging you to please read this Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Video showing one of the actual tests from the Jim Crow era. https://youtu.be/6lor3sfk-BE
No in the past black people here in America weren't allowed to be educated or learn to read. When they gained voting rights none of them knew how to read well so the racist made a law saying you have to pass a reading test or some shit so they couldn't vote.
You can't just look at the current situation and make rules based on that you have to look at it wholeistically. Not being able to read doesn't mean you are stupid. There are lots of reasons someone might fail a test but still be intelligent enough to vote and make a good informed choice.
Not correct. Literacy tests weren't testing actual reading ability and comprehension; they were explicitly intended to deny the right to vote. White people would be passed because they had grandparents that had been permitted to vote, and literally got grandfathered in. Non-white people would be given tests written in, for instance, latin. So even if they could read, the odds were very poor that they'd be able to read the language the test was in. Or they would be given tests that had very ambiguous questions, and any way they answered could be considered 'wrong'.
The problem is barriers to entry. There are certain things like voting that should have bare minimum entry requirements. (Proof of ID, lack of felony charges) Because once you put in any requirement (like education level etc.) those requirements can be manipulated by bad actors. We already have low voter turnout in the US as it is, and people already try to challenge that in bad faith (looking at all the "stolen election" bs in 2021).
Putting requirements like education is just begging people to manipulate it and skew results (harder tests in some areas, obtuse questions, general "elitist" focused motivations)
The point is voting needs to be accessible to everyone, even if some of those people are "not smart enough" then we need to focus on educating those people, not stopping them from voting because of some arbitrary "good enough" line.
IMO, felony charges are another tool of deliberate voter disenfranchisement, since the US justice system is clearly racist and has a shit ton of convictions compared to the EU (most countries, really - the US prison population per capita is one of the highest in the world). Lack of felony charges should probably be a requirement for being elected, but at this point they might start trying to use it for this, too.
I agree. I would actually like to see a 100% voter turnout from within prisons. Not only should we not strip that right, but it should be available for citizens while incarcerated as well. Seems easy to do.
Extremely close, because it's happened before.
Literacy tests at the polls were used as a tool to keep black people from voting, often by handing them different, harder tests.
Then don't do that.
Give everyone, and I mean everyone, a standard fifth grade test. It would not surprise me one bit if the highest failure rate of such a test comes from the large swath of redneck nitwits there exist over in America.
Who writes the test?
Who determines the test is at a fifth grade level?
Who will proctor the test?
Where will the test be administered?
When will the test be administered?
Who decides what a passing grade is?
Who grades the test?
Who verifies the grade on the test?
At every step there is an easy way to disenfranchise whatever people you don’t like. For instance: simply make the test only available at noon on the Monday before election. Make it only able to be taken at town hall. Immediately, anyone who works an hourly job will no be effectively disqualified from voting because they can’t take the test.
Now make the exam only available in English. Anyone who cannot speak English is now disqualified.
There are so many ways for literacy tests to go wrong, they’re pretty much only good for excluding people you don’t like from voting. Just let everyone vote and make it a mandatory holiday.
It's almost like we've run this experiment before at massive scale in real world conditions, and that experiment yielded data.
The white guy test: spell dog.
The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
See the problem yet?
You can design the exam to the purpose, and race isn't even the only factor to worry about. Maybe they claim a voter needs to prove financial literacy with advanced questions about various investment options that aren't relevant to the lower class.
This is what happened when the US did it before. https://lemmy.world/comment/18458771
And because of how fractured and fucked our political positions are, something like it would happen again. We need a lot more happening before even a proper and fair test could be made.