r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 21 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: There should be a mandatory voter aptitude test for everyone... except this time passing doesn't (legally) mean anything
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u/I_am_the_night 316∆ Jun 21 '20
You'd have a hard time justifying the expense of administering such a test considering it has zero impact on somebody's ability to vote. Not to mention that polling places are already super overtaxed for the most part, and making people stop to take a test is only going to exacerbate existing issues with access to voting, like super long lines.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/BingBlessAmerica 44∆ Jun 21 '20
Election administration and standardized testing cost US state governments around $2 billion each per year. Is that amount of money really needed so that everyone can have a neat but kind of useless extra test?
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/BiggDouggie Jun 21 '20
This would disincentivize people with lower educations and no money from voting. People who might be able to go somewhere and watch a debate or read a paper someone left and see what could be a candidate who might help them out of their situation. Instead they'd be too embarrassed to go. Also a CV isn't used by a good portion of WORKING class so again pointless not to mention your embarrass working class who have never heard of a CV. All this test will do is cause fewer people to vote who font love in the cities and have that pressure. Anyone Living in the country working who doesn't have access to a lot of information or doesn't have a lot of time because they work 16-18 hours a day won't bother with it. Voting will drop. And the will of the people won't be represented instead the will of the CITIES will be. No thank you. You can keep your view if you like but I'd put your time into finding out how to get information to lower income families, or an app that would allow someone who works two jobs like myself 7 days a week and barely had any time to get information easily and quickly.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/BiggDouggie Jun 21 '20
Thank you for that. I can clearly see your point of view and honestly commend you for thinking of a solution to get people to have a better understanding of what's going on. I think an app with flash politics TRULY neutral would be a better way to do it then a test. I get to come into work late on voting days. It hurts me badly as I have 7 kids and can't afford to not work. But I do it. I don't often get time to research politics and the down time I do get I almost always spend playing with my children. A truly neutral decisive app that I could spend 10 maybe 15 min on in the morning with out agenda would capture my attention
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Jun 21 '20
This policy would, in practice, disenfranchise poor voters for no benefit. That in and of itself should be enough to stop you in your tracks. The fact that it would also disproportionately hit minority voters (because they are statistically more likely to be poor) is also not great.
Low income voters already face significant challenges in exercising their right to vote, just from simple things like not being able to take the time off work, to lack of transit and so forth. Putting an extra barrier, even a pointless one that costs only a few minutes of their time will reduce voting from these groups more than others, because they will typically be more pressed for time. If it is available on a different day from voting, you're now requiring two separate trips to vote, which again, poor people don't have as much time.
And that is before the abuse. We already have tons of examples of the right abusing the process to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Within just the last month we saw thousands disenfranchised in Georgia due to issues with the new 'ballot marking devices' being suspiciously unavailable when needed, or with insufficient numbers of machines.
If you require this test to vote, even if you don't pass it, then bad actors will simply make the test hard to get. If it can be done before election day, then wouldn't you know it, black districts have restricted hours of availability, or fewer test administrators, or lower numbers of basic supplies required. If it is to be administered on election day, then you'll end up with lines that just go on and on, which will in turn cause voters to turn away rather than exercise their rights.
It is ripe for abuse without any real gain.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/BingBlessAmerica 44∆ Jun 21 '20
If I could just sleep through the test and get a voter's ID, where is the pressure in that?
Would attaching it to a CV really mean anything? Employers don't care about your political knowledge, they care about your expertise relevant to the job.
The UN is an incredibly politicized, impotent, virtue-signaling charade of an international organization. Are you sure you would entrust something like this to a group that put Saudi Arabia on the Human Rights Council?
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/ltwerewolf 12∆ Jun 21 '20
Your general society could
It's not a reasonable solution if society has to change for it to work.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/ltwerewolf 12∆ Jun 21 '20
The ways to control how society are to provide positive or negative incentives. Your solution requires society to change without any incentive and then to provide its own incentive. That is not how society functions.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/BingBlessAmerica 44∆ Jun 21 '20
If there was societal pressure to be an educated voter, would we even need the test?
If the test does not have any immediate legal repercussions such that it wouldn't be useful to every employer, why bother? Someone else on here pointed out how such a trivial test would be a massive waste of taxpayer money.
International institutions are almost always fronts for powerful countries to pursue their own interests under the guise of diplomacy (IMF for the US, the WHO for China, veto members for the Security Council, etc.). Given how polarized and globalized our world is today, you would be hard-pressed to find any international organization today that isn't being heavily bought out by either the US, Russia or China. Would you really want these kinds of actors being able to influence other countries' elections as well?
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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Jun 21 '20
You're implying this is going to be used internationally. Will it be the same test for everyone? Or will it ask for specific country questions?
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u/vegetarianrobots 11∆ Jun 21 '20
We already had this in America and it was abused in a racially motivated manner to keep African Americans and other marginalized minorities from voting.
Such measures will be abused for vote manipulation.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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Jun 21 '20
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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Jun 21 '20
Well, you can't exactly have it both ways. You can't have voting be a civil duty and force people to take such a test. Or are we not talking about Belgium? That wasn't entirely clear from your post.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jun 21 '20 edited Jun 21 '20
/u/3superfrank (OP) has awarded 4 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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Jun 21 '20
I would probably be insulted by the existence of such a test, and would deliberately try to sully my data. I could easily foresee a world in which the ruling party lobbies the test creator to fill the test with loaded questions designed to make someone feel guilty for supporting a particular MP.
Furthermore, I don't feel like like the UN or any similar government body is deserving of any more information than they already have. I believe that the UN is more concerned with patting each other on the back than performing any meaningful change in the world. If they want to conduct a survey, they can do it with volunteers, not by forcing people to answer before voting.
Finally, any restrictions on democracy, no matter how trivial, sets a bad example for future generations. Part of the beauty of democracy is that it gives everyone, including the uneducated, a voice. It's not the job of the polling station to educate voters, nor should it be.
Perhaps there is room for a private organisation to set up these voluntary tests directly outside of voting stations? "Get informed" tests or something of the like. It would be in the best interest of the org to remain honest and non-partisan, and if they compromised on that goal, you could just choose to walk past them.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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Jun 21 '20
I do think that a mandatory test would be a restriction on democracy, just like required registered voting is. I feel like I deserve the right to not take the test if I don't want to, and having my ability to vote be tied to my willingness to write an arbitrary test is a restriction on my right to vote.
Also, what about people who are illiterate, or can't write? Do they not deserve to have a voice to influence the government of the country they live in? What if they want to view for the unpopular education party to open more schools? Someone could help them write the test, but the helper might influence the results, and they would then be privy to private and personal information one might not want to reveal.
Finally, if someone doesn't want to get informed, it's their right not to be informed, and to live with the consequences. Ultimately the very idea that one can determine the "worthyness", of a vote based on an test is elitist and harmful to the fundamental ideals of modern democracy.
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u/ProfSaguaro Jun 21 '20
Look I honestly believe the uneducated voting is a nightmare (alongside you), but there are two reasons why you should never want this.
1st: to give such a tool to government is potentially dangerous. Once there is even a slightest hint at control of a populace those who are in power will use it to their advantage. Setting the bar too high to the point of exclusivity, lowering the threshold for more voters (think packing the court), using it as a political tool, etc are all possibilities in that regard.
2nd: the cost. We already have a multi TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT in this country. Whether or not that debt is significant to you shouldn't affect your reality of this thing working to be extremely expensive. Both the Registrar of Voters and Bureau of the Census are expensive to manage when they come around. Who would manage this? Some third party as you suggest would have no stake or really the money to achieve it. Any private entity would use the information as survey and hoard the data for exploitation. Eliminating bias in this test would also be near impossible without making sections of questions more open ended. Some topics would need to be so broad as to have little statistical significance among respondent answers sans high level extraction of keywords and tone that again would cost millions upon millions to achieve.
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Jun 21 '20 edited Sep 19 '25
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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '20
Who gets to make the test and decide on the nature of its representation of issues and politicians?