• @[email protected]
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    78 hours ago

    Yeah it sounds fun unless you have any awareness of how this actually worked out when it was used in the past. Fully not okay.

    • @[email protected]
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      47 hours ago

      You mean tests that were designed to ensure that only “the right people” were able to pass them. As well as a grandfather clause that exempted all of those right people (in modern times there would likely be a voter roll purge that would somehow lose most liberal voters while miraculously keeping all of the conservative ones).

  • @[email protected]
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    613 hours ago

    Even if you assumed the test successfully filtered out an educated voterbase, it would take all but five seconds for X party to cheat their exams, kind of like the “grandfather law” which essentially bypassed jim crow era literacy tests for everyone who was white.

  • I Cast Fist
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    271 day ago

    Brazil had something like that in the early republic days, only literate people could vote. Needless to say, only the robber baron elites kept getting elected, also thanks to the significant amount of fraud that happened. “The election is won during the counting”

    • BlujayoooOP
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      316 hours ago

      Good point, maybe the idea works better in theory than practice. Haha

  • JackbyDev
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    551 day ago

    Fuck no. 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          323 hours ago

          We just need to make sure the voting machines are not racist. Solvable, if we’re starting from scratch.

              • Captain Aggravated
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                522 hours ago

                Nope. It’ll never work. Because when I walk into the voting booth, how do I KNOW FOR A VERIFIABLE FACT that this machine here in the booth with me is running the published software?

                Computerized voting will always be a mistake.

                • I Cast Fist
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                  18 hours ago

                  Computerized voting will always be a mistake.

                  disagrees in brazilian voting machine noises

                • @[email protected]
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                  513 hours ago

                  The machine produces a physical paper record you can read, it doesn’t matter what software it’s running if you can verify your vote is accurate.

      • DreamButt
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        161 day ago

        you think the current racist rich people wouldn’t be racist and rich if we introduced an exam to the voting process?

        • @[email protected]
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          21 day ago

          I think the qualifying questions could be attached to the ballot and submitted anonymously.

          Race should not be discernable … in theory.

          • _thisdot
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            111 day ago

            Everyone affected by the policy decisions of the land should get to vote. No matter their race, literacy or political belief

            • @[email protected]
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              422 hours ago

              Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not. This is too big of a decision to leave up to disinterested and ill informed voters. I don’t care if you are left or right. blue or red.

              If you don’t know the basics of how our government works you do not deserve to have a say. If you do not know the basics of what is happening in the country, then you do not deserve to vote.

              ANYONE voting should be informed.

              How we test for this? i have no idea. There can not be a simple education requirement or literacy test. There are plenty of uneducated people that are very up to date and informed on current politics. There are plenty of very educated people that don’t care about what’s going on and just vote by party.

              But just because you have the right to an opinion does not mean your ignorant opinion is worth anything.

              • @[email protected]
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                210 hours ago

                Yes they should. But at the same time completely ignorant people should not.

                Jesus. You’re literally arguing for removing franchise from the majority of citizens. If they primarily reside in an area and will be affected by the policies, they should be able to vote on them, whether or not they’re ignorant.

                The problem is that you can very, very quickly arrive at the conclusion that if someone just had enough knowledge, they’d vote like me, and strip the vote from everyone that doesn’t agree with you. Except that people can, and do, have different beliefs, even with the same knowledge.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 hours ago

                I certainly trust The Party That’s In Charge At Any Given Time to subjectively come up with the criteria that objectively determines a voter’s ignorance level

          • @[email protected]
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            61 day ago

            Aside from the existing deficit due to hundreds of years of systemic discrimination you mean?

          • @[email protected]
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            51 day ago

            The tests never explicitly directly measured race nor required the voters name. They can design the tests to discriminate all sorts of ways based on the content.

            • @[email protected]
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              322 hours ago

              This is true. Whoever decides the questions and determines the correct answer holds a lot of power.

  • @[email protected]
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    561 day ago

    Who determines the questions and answers? Now they are the ones determining who can vote and thus the people in control.

      • @[email protected]
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        351 day ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 day ago

          Not even close. And I find it racist of you to assume that a minority is somehow incapable of passing an exam.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 hours ago

            The white guy test: spell dog.

            The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

            See the problem yet?

          • OBJECTION!
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            231 day ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 day ago

              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.

          • @[email protected]
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            41 day ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              110 hours ago

              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.

              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’.

          • JackbyDev
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            61 day ago

            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

          • Captain Aggravated
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            41 day ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 day ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                61 day ago

                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.

                • Captain Aggravated
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                  21 day ago

                  It’s almost like we’ve run this experiment before at massive scale in real world conditions, and that experiment yielded data.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 day ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                21 day ago

                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.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 day ago

            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.

  • Diplomjodler
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    391 day ago

    They used to do that in the US during the Jim Crow era. It went predictably.

  • @[email protected]
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    71 day ago

    InB4 the Non-Voters just start doing the Wilmington Massacre repeatedly.

    Check your history books about what happens when the majority of the population has no political voice. Things get ugly.

  • @[email protected]
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    231 day ago

    It’s not working. We have relatively equal education in Germany, and we have plenty of intelligent, educated people voting far right.

    • @[email protected]
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      71 day ago

      “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.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 day ago

        Even people who are actually smart buy into fascism, though. It’s not just a question of dumb vs intelligent, but of ethics.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 day ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            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…

            • @[email protected]
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              16 hours ago

              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.

    • 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%.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 day ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      422 hours ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      Hahaha both sides, am I right. Ahahahahh

      Shut the he fuck up and actually vote in primaries and we will have better candidates.

      • @[email protected]
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        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    2032 days ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      862 days ago

      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

    • @[email protected]
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      412 days ago

      Surely there are no examples in American history that voting eligibility exams were used to stop certain demographics from voting.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 days ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 hours ago

        Thanks, i also think it’s a great idea to force people to be involved in the processes that control their lives.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 days ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          131 day ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 day ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 day ago

          I’d love to know how many people either draw a dick, or vote for the legalised cannabis party or whatever.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 day ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 day ago

        Continue to allow blank-ballot to be a legal vote (as it is today). Nobody has to vote if they don’t want, and now if you’re trying to do a protest-abstain it actually gets noticed.

    • @[email protected]
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      A perfectly designed test - ambiguous enough that anyone subjected to it can be failed.

      I still don’t know what #11 is “supposed” to be.

      • JackbyDev
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        31 day ago

        It’s not supposed to be anything. There is no correct answer. The ambiguity is the point.

      • 0ops
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        402 days ago

        I think it’s supposed to say “Cross out the digit necessary”, so one digit, in which case cross out the 1 because there’s enough 0’s that crossing out one 0 isn’t enough.

        It’s 10 that has me confused. Is it asking for the last letter of the first word that starts with ‘L’ in that sentence? It doesn’t actually specify.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 day ago

          And question 12, looks like the intent was below circle 3, but they put below circle 2. So is it a typo, or another intentionally ambiguous question where you can fail whoever you want?

        • @[email protected]
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          182 days ago

          I would assume each question is independent of the others, so probably a T for ‘last’

          • 0ops
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            42 days ago

            That would be my guess too, but tbh that’s the only question I don’t feel confident about

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          Compared to rest of questions, the one doesn’t specify that the answer is contained in the sentence, By that logic, I’d say the first word is Louisiana.

          • Eyro Elloyn
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            “Oh, you’re black? Sorry, it was first L word in this undisclosed dictionary that we use for these tests”

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          That’s a perfect example of its ambiguousness; I read that as “the number below [this question]” and assumed I had to cross out enough zeros to make it 1,000,000.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 days ago

        Can anyone explain #1 to me? What are you supposed to circle? It says “the number or the letter”. There’s 1 number and the entire sentence is literally letters…

        It’s like when the waiter asks “Soup or salad?” and you say “Yes”.

        • @[email protected]
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          111 hours ago

          I can help! So the first step is to be white, and then the second step is to do whatever you think seems right

        • ✺roguetrick✺
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          272 days ago

          Circle? It clearly says draw a line around whatever you decided wrongly to indicate. Lines don’t curve and aren’t boxes, so good luck.

          • @[email protected]
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            214 hours ago

            This was my first hold up. I think the correct answer is to print the test onto a substrate that can be molded into a sphere. Then you can draw a geodesic around the number.

            • @[email protected]
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              52 days ago

              Oh, yes. Reading it again you’re correct. I was looking for the number of letter on the sentence. When it clearly says of. Guess I don’t deserve to vote.

      • @[email protected]
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        112 days ago

        What’s interesting about the literacy tests is how much they have in common with IQ tests!

        For example, a friend of mine remembers his childhood testing. For part of it a child is handed a set of cards and told to put them in order.

        They have pictures of a set of blocks being assembled into a structure and the sun moves in an arc in the background.

        Following the order implied by the sun is, apparently, wrong.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 days ago

        You got enough answers but here’s how you deny someone the right to vote: the question really means you need to make the number 1000000 exact as that is the number “below” the question. Not fewer, physically below.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 days ago

            Four. You need to make the number below (less than) one million, so cross out zeros until it’s 100,000.
            ”0000000” isn’t a properly formatted number.

            It’s a fun game finding the ways you can tell someone whatever they said is wrong.

      • @[email protected]
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        You cross out all of the 0s after the 1 and first 5 0s, so that the number is 100,000

        Or you cross out just the 1

        • @[email protected]
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          42 days ago

          Six zeroes, right? Five zeroes makes one hundred thousand. Six makes a million. Or am I missing something?

            • @[email protected]
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              202 days ago

              This is an example of the gotcha this test did, you can read the question two different ways. Making the number below the question one million, or making the number itself below one million.

              • @[email protected]
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                112 days ago

                Oh, Jesus. I read “below” to mean it was referring to the number directly “below” the instructions. I didn’t even consider that it could be read another way. Fuck everything about that test.

        • @[email protected]
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          132 days ago

          I mean purely pedantic, I have no idea the original test writers… but based on how I read the words

          The number (one singular number needs to be crossed out)

          Below one million, IE number < 1,000,000

          So my conclusion

          10000000000 < 1,000,000

          • @[email protected]
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            32 days ago

            There is more than one right answer, which means there’s always a wrong answer to disqualify the target of prejudice from voting.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 days ago

          Ah, but they can get you because a bunch of zeros isn’t “a number”.

          You could cross out the first 1000000… leaving just the last zero, though.

    • @[email protected]
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      992 days ago

      Also worth pointing out, WHY the test is so bad… 1. obviously not even well educated people today can agree on the meaning of a good portion of the questions.

      but the biggest thing is, not everyone had to take them… IE the key point intention was “if a parent or grandparent has ever voted, you can skip this test”. which is such a blatant giving away that they don’t care of an individuals knowledge, they aren’t actually worried if they can read, they were just keeping first generation voters from voting… at a time when in particular a specific subset of american’s were in position to be first generation voters.

    • Match!!
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      572 days ago

      There are two more pages to this and it gets worse

    • AItoothbrush
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      152 days ago

      This is like the kryptonite of autistic people… and black voters whenever they had this…

      • @[email protected]
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        52 days ago

        Um fuck you? Being autistic doesn’t mean we can’t circle a letter or understand a sentence. Hell, this shit is incredibly literal minded and is easy as hell for us. Maybe you’re the one with trouble…

        • SavvyWolf
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          152 days ago

          You’re assuming that the grading system follows the “literal minded” definitions. On top of that, you better believe that they’ll make you do the test in a loud and overstimulating environment.

        • @[email protected]
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          You don’t understand the test if you think it’s all literal and “about circling the letter.”

          You would, in fact, get failed by the white eugenicists giving it to you the moment they figured out you were autistic.

          One of the reasons they would know is that you think there are objectively correct answers to all of the questions and that most of them are not traps to allow a biased test giver to fail you and pass someone else that gave the same answer.

        • @[email protected]
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          This test is clearly intended to be deceptive. For example, with Q1 should I circle the number ‘1’ or ‘a’? With Q4 how do you draw a line around something? 11 is clearly a trick question designed to put pressure on people.

          I’m autistic and whilst I could confidently argue an answer for these questions, I’m pretty sure someone would disagree with the reasoning I use, and a single failure means I fail the test

        • @[email protected]
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          52 days ago

          The point is they are not literal in any sense. Most of these questions can be interpreted at least 2 or more ways. I can’t even wrap my head around what question 1 even wants. It’s like word salad if you really read it carefully and literally.

      • @[email protected]
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        Nope. The answer to number ten is ‘a’.

        Assuming you went with “last”, but that starts with ‘l’, not ‘L’. Each other question also specifies “one this line” where relevant, but not this one. The first word starting with ‘L’ is “Louisiana”.

        The trick of the test is that it’s subjective to the person grading it. I could have also told you that the line drawing one (12) was wrong by just saying it’s not the correct way to do it. Or that 11 was wrong because you didn’t make the number below one million, it’s equal to one million. Or if you crossed off one more zero I’d say you could have gotten fewer by crossing off the 1 at the start. Or that a long string of zeros isn’t a properly formatted number.

      • TAG
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        21 day ago

        You do not get to vote. You drew a curve for question 12 when the instructions specified a line.

      • OBJECTION!
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        52 days ago

        Number 11 says, “cross out the number,” as in, only one number. Pretty sure you have to cross out “1” so that it’s just a bunch of zeros.

    • Daemon Silverstein
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      12 days ago

      @[email protected] @[email protected]

      TIL I’m possibly partially (if not entirely) illiterate.

      Starting with the first question, “Draw a line a_round_ the number or letter of this sentence.”, which can be ELI5’d as follows:

      The main object is the number or letter of this sentence, which is the number or letter signaling the sentence, which is “1”, which is a number, so it’s the number of this sentence, “1”. This is fine.

      The action being required is to “Draw a line around” the object, so, I must draw a line.

      However, a line implies a straight line, while around implies a circle (which is round), so it must be a circle.

      However, what’s around a circle isn’t called a line, it’s a circumference. And a circumference is made of infinitesimally small segments so small that they’re essentially an arc. And an arc is a segment insofar it effectively connects two points in a cartesian space with two dimensions or more… And a segment is essentially a finite range of a line, which is infinite…

      The original question asks for a line, which is infinite. However, any physical object is finite insofar it has a limited, finite area, so a line couldn’t be drawn: what can be drawn is a segment whose length is less or equal to the largest diagonal of the said physical object, which is a rectangular paper, so drawing a line would be impossible, only segments comprising a circumference.

      However, a physically-drawn segment can’t be infinitesimal insofar the thickness of the drawing tool would exceed the infinitesimality from an infinitesimal segment. It wouldn’t be a circumference, but a polygon with many sides.

      So I must draw a polygon with enough sides to closely represent a circumference, composed by the smallest possible segments, which are finite lines.

      However, the question asks for a line, and the English preposition a implies a single unit of something… but the said something can be a set (e.g. a flock, which implies many birds)… but line isn’t a set…

      However, too many howevers.

      So, if I decide to draw a circumference centered at the object (the number 1), as in circle the number, maybe it won’t be the line originally expected.

      I could draw a box instead, which would technically be around it, and would be made of lines (four lines, to be exact). But, again, a line isn’t the same as lines, let alone four lines.

      I could draw a single line, but it wouldn’t be around.

      Maybe I could reinterpret the space. I could bend the paper and glue two opposing edges of it, so any segment would behave as a line, because the drawable space is now bent and both tips of the segment would meet seamlessly.

      But the line wouldn’t be around the object, so the paper must be bent in a way that turns it into a cone whose tip is centered on the object, so a segment would become a line effectively around the object…

      However, I got no glue.

      /jk

      • PaintedSnail
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        72 days ago

        The ambiguity was by design. It let the test proctor decide who did or did not pass with near impunity. This was used to legally deny voting rights to minorities.

  • @[email protected]
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    If I recall correctly, Aristotle proposed something like only the educated being able to vote. 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.

    A caveat I’ll add is that there would need to be more community colleges built and much more funding for pre-K thru 12th grade as well.

    • @[email protected]
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      91 day ago

      There’d need to be a massive overhaul of the education system. Most people who do graduate still make stupid-ase, self-sabotaging choices.

      • @[email protected]
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        117 hours ago

        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.