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This is probably in part a meritocracy, though how the government defines ‘merit’ is probably quite subjective.
Humans are all too human. A purely statistical vote such as proportional representation is most likely the most scientific method regardless of what government is elected. If a civilisation must fall through its own vices and fallacy (oh hey, we’ve been there before!), then let’s allow the collective consciousness of our fellow human beings work it out.
Ever…so…fucking…slowly.
It’s not working. We have relatively equal education in Germany, and we have plenty of intelligent, educated people voting far right.
Yup. Same in the States.
People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.
Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn’t guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they’re clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.
Arguably the educated and intelligent are more likely to profit from fascism (to an extent), anyway - they’re going to do the oppressing, while most workers are going to be on the ‘being oppressed’ side.
“Educated” does not equal intelligent, and it certainly does not imply broad intelligence. You can train a relatively stupid human being to do all kinds of stuff and if you’ve ever worked with people with degrees you know what little value they carry.
I went to college and have white collar career and my family is largely university educated. I worked with structural engineers at my last job and half them were just barely able to do their jobs with the worst ones being the senior people. Elsewhere in the world there have been anti-vax doctors and nurses, psychotic therapists, and theologians who have read the bible who still do all the horrible things they definitely know are bullshit. I bet nearly half the people here on Lemmy know a software developer or three who shouldn’t ever touch a computer. People with degrees are more likely to be more intelligent but, especially while living in a world where they’re basically expected, that’s really just not a guarantee.
Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It’s not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.
We have govs and gobs and gobs of research that show that the best forward for everyone is cooperation. In fact, a lot of that research explicitly shows that the least ethical approaches are often the worst ones by nearly every metric except for “gives a handful of the wrong people way too much power”.
It’s like the four day work week and how we know it’s better not only for employee happiness but also for productivity and talent retention. We know that paying people fairly means that people can actually afford to buy the products we sell. We know that GDP is a bad measure of economic strength and that the most robust economies are those where a lot of smaller amounts change hands frequently. We as a species know all this, and anyone I would consider intelligent would have picked up on these patterns even if they weren’t explicitly told but they ARE being told, over and over again.
We need a new measure of what intelligence is but anything qualitative instead of quantitative is incredibly difficult for most people to grasp and they end worshipping the worst people who have stuff regardless of how they got it. I have the same diploma as my classmates and most of them shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near building design; pointing out my ability to graduate from a program even they could graduate from is not worth that much.
Intelligent people are not omniscient or universally unbiased. Just because they’re capable of doing a difficult job well, speak eloquently or excel in IQ tests doesn’t mean they won’t fall for political fallacies, aren’t xenophobic etc…
Being good at your little task, and in this case we’re talking about degrees so it’s just passing a couple courses and schmoozing your boss afterward, does not make you intelligent. I know some profoundly stupid people who barely scrape by, many by just overworking themselves because they lack the ability to grow and learn new, better ways to do things on their own.
The bar for “intelligent” is on the fucking floor, apparently.
Are they very educated then?
Keep trying, Jay. One day you’ll make a funny comic.
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.
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.
You obviously don’t know the history of voting tests. In the US, tests were designed to be virtually impossible for anyone to pass, but white voters didn’t have to take them, because the rule was you didn’t have to take the test if your grandparents could vote. They were implemented in a racist way.
You want to trust the government to design and implement tests, that sort of thing is what it could easily lead to, whether you want it or not.
Yes I’m well aware of Jim Crowe laws. Before you can enact something fair you’re first going to burn down everything you have currently.
The systems you have right now are a dead end, and there is no way to manage or change that system from the outside. So first it must be destroyed.
Troll
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.
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
Between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were used as an effective tool for disenfranchising African Americans in the Southern United States. Literacy tests were typically administered by white clerks who could pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race. Illiterate whites were often permitted to vote without taking these literacy tests because of grandfather clauses written into legislation.
Other countries, notably Australia, as part of its White Australia policy, and South Africa adopted literacy tests either to exclude certain racialized groups from voting or to prevent them from immigrating to the country.
Video showing one of the actual tests from the Jim Crow era. https://youtu.be/6lor3sfk-BE
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.
There are certain things like voting that should have bare minimum entry requirements. (Proof of ID, lack of felony charges)
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.
The white guy test: spell dog.
The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
See the problem yet?
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.
Voting should be mandatory, punished by like a $200 fine for non voters.
Brazil does this I think & it’s not going well
Yes, let’s force everyone to vote whether or not they have any clue what’s going on or who the candidates are, great idea.
It works in Australia. The main upside is since voting is mandatory the onus is on the government (or more precisely, an independent body called the Australian Electoral Commission) to make sure there are enough polling places, voting papers etc to accommodate the full turn out. Further, voting is done on a Saturday and there is plenty of opportunity to vote early/do a postal vote/vote from a completely different electorate etc.
My understanding from several US elections I’ve seen is there are a LOT of people who would like to vote but can’t due to work, ridiculous waiting times, lack of facilities etc. Compulsory voting would mean all of this would have to be taken care of without the states mucking around with their own rules.
To address the issue you have, yes, people who have no clue turn up and vote BUT whilst voting is compulsory, submitting a valid vote is not. So long as you turn up and take your bits of paper you can just draw a dick on them or whatever if you don’t feel you know enough to have a say.
ridiculous waiting times, lack of facilities etc.
This is a big part of the GOP’s strategy for maintaining power in a “democracy” despite not having the support of anywhere near a majority of the general public. Wherever possible, they ensure that voting in Democratic areas is as difficult as they can make it. In some places they’ve even made it illegal just to hand out water to people waiting in line to vote.
I’d love to know how many people either draw a dick, or vote for the legalised cannabis party or whatever.
You can (and should) provide fair access to voting without making it mandatory. Most people would probably submit a valid vote anyway, there’s a lot of no/low information voters already and refusing to vote, for example to boycott the election or for whatever other reason is also a valid political stance. Plus I’m not a fan of any financial penalties because they’re basically an extra civil rights subscription for the wealthy who can afford to pay the fines, while a poor person who doesn’t make it to the polling booth gets disproportionately screwed.
Thanks, i also think it’s a great idea to force people to be involved in the processes that control their lives.
And that’s what makes you a tyrant.
Waaa oh no the big bads are gonna make me be politically active so i vote in my own self interests and the interests of my community.
The horror
I don’t know about a fine, but it should be more effort to not vote than to vote. That way the people who are determined not to vote still have an out that doesn’t involve violence.
If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to voted. I think if everyone was guaranteed free access to both a high school and college education, along with all food and living costs covered for anyone studying, then I could see having at least any associates level degree being an okay barrier of entry to voting.
However, such a thing would need to be protected by some unremovable barriers. For instance, education would need to continue receiving appropriate funding, food and other living costs such as renting a room would need to be covered even as the cost for these things are variable. People with disabilities would need to receive proper accommodations.
There’d need to be a massive overhaul of the education system. Most people who do graduate still make stupid-ase, self-sabotaging choices.
Oh for sure, there are a lot of different areas in education that need to be changed. We need to go back to teaching people how to think rather than prepping them to just memorize for the test. That’s not even mentioning the issue that AI can have on the learning processes.
It is 100% used as a weapon to disenfranchise voters.
I do however believe that it should be used on CANDIDATES.
While the idea of being required to pass a test to be eligible is bad for the reasons others have given, I do like the idea of having to take a test in order to run. No pass/fail, but the results are made public so we know who we’re voting for. Make it a random compilation pulled from the state testing from each state, or something. With a large enough data set, we should be able to prevent people gaming the system.
Every single candidate should be made to pass a basic grade 8 biology exam.
Who gets to design the test, though?
AI.
Fight me.
I think it should be a coin flip. Heads or tails. You lose whichever way it lands. That’ll keep the riffraff out.
That is the one fear, especially considering… a now controlling amount of politicians can’t accept basic facts… so we’d see questions like “is climate change real”, “how old is the earth”.
The test will ask how old the Earth is. Any answer over 6000 years or so will be marked false.
Me.
You have my vote, but only if you pass MY OWN candidate tester test.
Mexican exam-off
Anyone who solves a millennium prize problem earns the right to vote.
Queue Cletus declaring that Obama failed it but Trump passed
There is a general rejection of such a test. Obviously voting in its current form doesn’t work. If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?
If everybody keeps being allowed to vote, what can be done to improve the quality of the outcome?
With you being the judge of what is the “quality of the outcome”? That isn’t democratic.
Right, who could make that judgement? And everybody voting under the influence of propaganda is also not democratic.
So what is the moral thing to do?
An education system that doesn’t aim to turn the population into diligent cattle.
Make it more accessible and provide better candidates.
Accessible things like:
- nearly anything other than first past the post
- Mandated Paid time off to vote.
- Vote by mail(universal absentee ballot).
- Strict adherence to vote outcomes (Congress cannot ignore at state nor national level).
- full-stop limits on campaign spending
- reform campaign donation regulation
- limit campaign advertising to small window near election (e.g. 3 months prior)
Better candidates like:
- Anyone left of “defacing property is equivalent to or worse than assault on a person”
- One that has a platform people are excited to vote for
I promise you there’s plenty of highly educated idiots, such a test would only limit the voting base to elite idiots.
Except the candidates would all be garbage anyways haha
Candidates being all garbage is exactly what you’d expect when they’re just pawns for the people actually running the government (i.e. owners of big corporations).
Since they’re shit, they’re not popular and can’t achieve much on their own. When they’re not useful anymore they can be blamed and replaced by the next puppet.
Of course they’re also shit, exactly because they’re in the pocket of the very wealthy. In the US it seems even impossible to gain any significant position without their blessing.
Hahaha both sides, am I right. Ahahahahh
Shut the he fuck up and actually vote in primaries and we will have better candidates.
I vote in all the primaries you shut the fuck up you don’t know who you are talking to dude
The options in the primaries usually suck too or the people in power push out the ones the people actually like.
Nah, the exams wouldn’t be mandatory for everyone. You have a degree? Exempt. You graduated from one of the “certified” high schools (the ones in white neighborhoods but we don’t call it that wink wink)? Exempt. Passed NRA shooting license exam? Exempt.
If voting needed an exam, they would use that exam to stop certain demographics from voting. And no, I’m not talking about the ignorant.
They used to do this and it turned out exactly how you describe. I would probably also add it’d incentivize politicians to dismantle educational institutions serving certain demographics
Surely there are no examples in American history that voting eligibility exams were used to stop certain demographics from voting.
And the approved voters just happened to be from the 50 people who controlled the testing.
Ah yes, blamed the disenfranchised voters for not wanting to jump through another hoop. Its a big club, and, sorry, pal; even if you fill out the test, you ain’t in it.
They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.
This is a bad idea. You would just be creating another layer of gerrymandering.
I won’t call out of or the drawer for bad idea. The idea is fine. There’s just zero ways to ever implement it. It’s nice to dream though
No it’s not.
Please explain
You’re really in a good mood today, aren’t you?
I don’t think they understand why this would be a terrible idea and are just hung up on the fact they want it and we don’t have it.
You realize that literacy tests were used to exclude minorities from voting, right? The idea is not fine because it’s inherently oppressive.
Yes holy shit Jesus fuck yes I know this. Read again the second part where I said that there’s no way to do this in reality.
Ehh… I think it’s fundamentally problematic. Why should only a subset of the adult population be allowed to vote on laws that affect everyone?
You mean like how the house and senate are the ones who actually vote on the laws instead of direct democracy?
In most places, citizens below a certain age can’t vote, yet laws affect them as well. By extension, one could probably argue that some people “don’t know what’s best for them” and experts/educated people are better suited to make the laws.
(However, creating such a test would obviously be impossible in practice, and would result in a conflict of interest, leading to discrimination, as muusemuuse points out.)
If there were a practical way to do it, a way to ensure that only those who were well informed on a topic could have a say in it wouldn’t be an issue. The only barrier to voting would be your desire to inform yourself.
Unfortunately there isn’t, because just about every word in the above sentences can be twisted by someone with illintent.
The concept isn’t fundamentally flawed, it’s just blocked by insurmountable obstacles.Thank you for getting what I was trying to say. Spot on, I don’t think the idea is wrong. It would be nice if there was a test to say “hey are you able to vote on these topics, have you researched, are you voting with your brain or with emotions?” - which is why I say the idea is fine. There isn’t though. There isn’t a single way to do that fairly or equitably.
Thank god the commenters immediately jumped down my throat to tell me what I already knew.
Exactly. The problem with having to meet certain criteria for being able to vote is who gets to set that criteria. We would end up with “black people have to guess the number of bubbles in this bar of soap” all over again.
Uhh, no the idea is most certainly not “fine”
It’s only fine if you don’t think about it at all beyond the surface level presentation.
The concept that only the educated should vote is essentially the entire advantage of living in a republic. If the test was actually fairly made it would be fine, the real problem is it would be used to limit specific demographics from voting while not actually ensuring only the educated can vote
Considering I’m against the concept of living in hierarchical government structures, such as republics, that’s not exactly a benefit from my perspective. It just exposes the flaws of living under hierarchy.
I mean… I don’t see the comic portraying the idea as good. More just using it as a vehicle to call most people dumb.
