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.

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.

> 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.