>There needs to be an IQ and political education test before people can register to vote.
Would you care to expand upon this argument? What sort of test would you require, and how would such policy effect American democracy?
Would you care to expand upon this argument? What sort of test would you require, and how would such policy effect American democracy?
Why shouldn't the same go for voting? Education is paramount for a good democracy. If the national education system doesn't work, even fixing it is futile because there are already so many indoctrinated and uneducated voters in the population. The best option is to weed out the uneducated ones from the educated ones.
The political education test would be similar to a test you take for naturalization: it quizzes you on the party system, how the nation was founded, what the Bill of Rights specifies, et al.
Right now the only qualification to vote is citizenship. That needs to be changed.
Cutting people out of the system will only result in second class citizens. We need to raise people up, not push them down.
The problem is you can educate stupid people but it won't make them not stupid. By definition 50% of people are left of the mean on the IQ spectrum. By HN standards probably 80% of all people are hopeless.
When you make "being educated" a prerequisite for voting you necessarily create an underclass. You prevent people who are "undereducated", as defined by those who are "educated" (see the problem there?), from participating in society. That is, you strip them of citizenship. They are not represented.
I don't know if that's good or bad. Many argue that democracy is inherently flawed because of people's general unintelligence. I think this argument has much merit. But you can't solve the flaw within democracy itself. Which means maybe there is another, better system of governance out there, and democracy isn't the be-all and end-all we've been raised to think of it as.
Democracy isn't a good thing in and of itself, basically, so maybe we should re-evaluate.
It'd be great if elections could be fought on something more substantial than a candidate's haircut or who most people would rather drink a beer with.
I don't think that general lack of intelligence is responsible for people creating or publishing polls about drinking beer with candidates.
People get fed this tripe.
And even on HN it's hard to have political discussions. Every political thread will have some great, insightful, thoughtful, comments, and a bunch of tedious partisan bickering.
If you have one group deciding what sort of person deserves self determination, you aren't striking that balance anymore.
The essence of democracy is that you don't need a detailed understanding of the history, voter mechanics or text of a particular law to express a valid preference for or against a candidate that has something to say that concerns you, however imperfect your understanding of that candidate's intentions and their likely consequences may be. If you can't grasp that, bar yourself from the ballot box.
(and that's without discussing the obvious electoral advantages to an incumbent that might accrue from influence over setting "voter tests". Sure, you have to pass a bar to be allowed to work for somebody, or study somewhere, or borrow money - that's all for the testers' benefit)