A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

I know, from a human rights point of view, this is very problematic. But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote.

Of course, those tests shouldn't be that ambiguous, but if they were phrased a bit more clear, these would be very simple. At the same time, English has changed in the last 50 years. That phrasing might have been common back then.

Imagine what would happen if you put a "who won the US 2020 election?" question on the form.

This is the key problem of democracy, the educated part of the society is always minority.

>But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote.

wasn't it basically the original Greek democracy?

Any test you can imagine would still be used to favor the rich and powerful, and to oppress and disenfranchise undesirables.

It doesn't matter how rational it seems. Government - particularly the racist oligarchy that is the US government - cannot be trusted to act with rational benevolence.

I don't think education do much. People still stupidly vote for one of either republicans or Democrats based on trivial psychological reasons.

If education played some role you would probably might have seen an alternative party/form of government emerging over time as people became more educated.

You misunderstand the primary purpose of a democracy: to prevent civil war by giving everyone a voice.

And in this it works remarkably well.

I think you're being a bit naive. The test was designed to disenfranchise people, it was literally designed by people who didn't want black people to vote. You can't say "Well I guess it could've been less ambiguous" the whole point was to be ambiguous to give a pretext to disqualify black people from voting.

You can get 0 answers wrong and there would still be a way of throwing away your vote. Take question 11 - cross out the number necessary when making the number below 1 million. Do you cross out the excess 000s or do you cross out 1,000,000. Or do you cross out enough numbers to make the number below 1 million? The answer is it doesn't matter because (a) by giving you a multiple viable chance they've already managed to disenfranchise a percentage of the people they're targetting, and (b) whatever you do they can just claim the opposite interpretation and refuse you a right to vote.

There wasn't some high minded idealism behind this test. It was a tool for the people administering the election to select who they wanted to allow to vote. Any test you design will serve the same purpose, albeit some more efficiently than others.

Knowing facts and applying algebraic formulas indeed doesn't seem to be doing much, but I guess education about logic, critical thinking, biases, fallacies and debate _would_ play a role _if such education was emphasized_.

> It was a tool for the people administering the election to select who they wanted to allow to vote. Any test you design will serve the same purpose, albeit some more efficiently than others.

Yes. The point of literacy and competency testing is obviously exclusionary.

The fact that literacy and competency testing were misused in the past is no excuse to allow illiterates and incompetents to determine the course of our civilization.

That's a scary-sounding hypothetical. It's nowhere near as scary as the current reality, wherein the course of our civilization is decided by illiterates and nincompoops.

> The fact that literacy and competency testing were misused in the past is no excuse to allow illiterates and incompetents to determine the course of our civilization.

I'm glad we both agree that more money should abundantly be allotted to education budgets, and making higher quality education more accessible — without discrimination — to the masses.

I do view the literacy and competency tests as a tool that should be pointing in the other direction: at all elected and non-elected officials; exhibit A, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology of 2014 [0] (relevant timestamp: 02:47).

[0]: https://youtu.be/lPgZfhnCAdI?t=167

I think there's a broad misunderstanding about the core goal of democracy.

It's obviously not the optimal system to ensure that the best possible decisions are taken, it's not designed for that.

It's more about allowing everyone to have a say in their destiny, to decide together what "best" means, even if it's somewhat objectively wrong.

Of course, you need significant balancing mechanisms to ensure that bad decisions are not too common. So you don't let the people micromanage everything and you build the system such that different parts of it keep each other in check. Sometimes it goes too far and the population has very limited choice over what's going on, sometimes it doesn't go far enough and the system is incompetent and chaotic. Often it's both, it's a hard problem.

But there's obviously better human organizational systems to take the right decisions towards a given goal or metric. That's why companies are not democratic, they are better at optimizing wealth creation (or whatever other metric), but we keep them sandboxed within the big-picture, keeping monopolies to a minimum (particularly the monopoly on violence, the core leverage of any government) so that they have a somewhat limited influence on people's lives. The military is not democratic either, neither is the justice system, nor many other performance-critical systems, they are more optimized to take better decisions at the expense of giving a choice to everyone they impact.

How would you answer question 20?

Some say that the Roman Republic lasted for so long because it gave just enough voice to the people so they felt heard and the ones in power could not afford to fully ignore them, while not giving the people sufficient power to elect someone that could up-end the oligarchic status quo that was proving to be so competent. There were also lots of checks and balances within the oligarchy to prevent any given radical person or faction from taking over.

For example, Consuls (president-like) were voted-in indirectly through a popular assembly (kinda like the Electoral College). They elected two Consuls that had to rule jointly and keep each other in check. Their term was only 1 year and they could not run for election again for the next 10 years. Consuls rarely had the chance to do any significant damage to the system or build-up power.

The Senators served for life and acted as a counterbalance. They were also elected rather indirectly by other popular assemblies, but they came mostly from the aristocracy that maintained a consistent tradition of Roman culture and morals, for better or worse. The thing is that there were enough of them (300, later 600) that internal competition always kept them in check and prevented anyone from getting too much power.

An interesting system.

But please do not take this as me advocating for such a system. The Romans were terrible violent oppressors by modern standards. A system of government lasting for a long time is not necessarily a good feature, it just means that it's good at keeping its power, nothing else. A status quo that cannot be easily changed is great if you are lucky and the status quo turns out to be good, but it's horrible if the situation is bad and there is no easy way to fix it.

I just wanted to give a bit of context.

I’ve thought this in the past, but I’ve changed my mind.

People with poor reading and logic and legal skills are still people, living in society, paying taxes, with lives just as complicated and interesting as mine. Who am I to say that they shouldn’t have a say in how things are run?

As opposed to allowing people who are naive enough to believe such tests will be deployed equitably to vote. Perhaps, if you believe in the concept of restricting voting, you can feel the inspiration to begin with yourself. Somehow though, I imagine you don't like that idea. Which makes me wonder why you would then even believe in disenfranchisement in the first place.

> But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote.

Imagine as well that only the elite or nobility has access to education, reading / writing, etc. It would bring society back to the pre-Enlightenment era, or whenever it was that education / reading / writing / math / etc became available to anyone.

> If education played some role you would probably might have seen an alternative party/form of government emerging over time as people became more educated.

But there are plenty of alternative parties / forms of government, it's just that in the existing political systems - especially in the US - it is reduced to a two-party system. First-past-the-post voting naturally leads to a two party system.

Basically, the US is doomed to stay in a two party system unless one of them decides to change the constitution or whatever dictates this system, or there's a successful revolution. (I don't think Jan 6th would be a successful revolution even if they, for example, killed all the senators).

As of the end of 2021, about 65% of Republicans responders to relevant surveys believed that Trump won the 2020 election [1]. I'm hoping that the percentage has dropped to below 50% by now.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/02/viral-imag...

Why shouldn't illiterates and nincompoops have a say?

There are politicians that I think are morons (without naming specifics, think about any politician that you think is dumb), and that only morons would vote for, but morons live here too, and they're affected by the laws as well. Shouldn't they have some say in how things are run?

I know the "two wolves and a sheep choosing dinner" argument, but I think giving some voice to everyone is pretty important. People deserve to have their voices heard.

Stupid people have just as much right to have their societal problems heard and solved as the rest of us.

Nobody deserves to suffer or be ignored for the horrid crime of being born stupid or "mentally deficient" by your standards.

Plenty of democrats are trying to enable Ranked Choice Voting in the US, and that is a good step towards improving how the US voting system works, and reducing the power that the parties have.

Ranked choice voting for example means that Republicans in mostly Democrat states like california could be better represented than they currently are, by voting for a "more conservative" candidate who will still get democrat votes.

The republican party is explicitly against ranked choice voting despite this.