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

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

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.

I read it as “1.” Which underlines the point, I think

You actually weren’t subjected to literacy tests “if your grandfather was eligible to vote”, ie your grandfather was a white citizen.

It does, but in common language that could go either way. Especially since it’s not the technical phrase “greater than”.

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.

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

You need to make it under one million

0 is a number.

0 is below 1 million

You don’t get to vote but also you might need to see a doctor. I think you might have ingested way too much colloidal silver. Like this guy

Oh, well, carry on, then. Carry on.

Mexican exam-off

Just people like you, for some reason.

Said the guy who just said “Maybe the author created pro-fascist propaganda he doesn’t actually agree with on accident.”

To further clear things up, I’m referring to your personal and extensive posting history of fascist or fascist-leanimg rhetoric.

Not that I doubt you consider yourself an enlightened centrist.

The phrase “voting machine” is also a problem.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The white guy test: spell dog.

The black guy test: prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

See the problem yet?

I’m glad it was a misunderstanding. :)

I think my central point still holds, so I’ll develop on it a bit more.
Every era has its challenges, and they’re all seemingly insurmountable and possibly the worst thing yet. They’re less significant from our perspective, but we have the benefit of history. We know how the story progressed.
FDR did have nuclear war looming, they just only knew that meant “bad”, but not the details. It was probably scarier then. We know now that he actually didn’t because the German program was doomed to failure from the start, but they didn’t at the time. They had an economy that was in tatters, a massive food shortage resulting in poorly quantified starvation, the most powerful militaries on the planet conquering Europe and Asia, and so on.
We’re past the age where the president is likely to be able to inspire unity of purpose like they did then, but that’s always been how you get people to care: someone needs to convince them, or you pay them. In a time if turmoil, you can inspire a lot of purpose by giving people a stable job, and then constantly extolling the virtues of the purpose they’re working towards.

All that to say, we don’t know the future. You are living through the dawn of a new age. Our problems aren’t insurmountable, we just don’t know how to do it yet. The details are different, but it’s not a new circumstance.
I’m not an advocate for apathy, but… If it does go wrong, what actually happens? America collapses, war, people die, and turmoil. We can’t know the timeline, and we have 3/4 of those now with the remaining being pretty intangible. The fall of the Roman empire, depending on which fall you’re looking at, took 300 to a 1000 years. To the people living through the fall, it wasn’t even visible. The final fall ushered in the Renaissance, both a period of great development, but also pessimism born out of the proceeding centuries of turmoil (European peace shattered by 200 years of war, famine, several plagues, and an ice age). Injecting masses of fleeing scholars from Constantinople into that propelled things to new heights as their knowledge from the fallen empire blended with the local knowledge.
We don’t know if the empire is falling, how long it’s going to take, if we’re at the beginning or the end, or if we’re even in the empire. We don’t know if the collapse will trigger a dark age (not actually dark, just “not roman”), or a golden age as waves of American scientists, artists, writers, mathematicians and engineers take their work to China and unintentionally create a fresh blend of perspectives and shared knowledge that builds on both. (Stereotypes aside we have a lot of those).

People problems are ultimately solvable by people, inevitably by talking.
History consistently tells us that it’s weird, messy, and long. Live life, be kind. If someone says to do something for other people for moral reasons, it’s a coin toss if they’re doing something history will look kindly upon. If someone says to do something for group identity, they’re probably fine. If they say to do something to someone else for group identity, they’re most likely not. If someone is saying something you’ve heard before but a lot of people are listening and the people in power don’t like it, thiniare probably shifting. Maybe not for the people speaking, but shifting.

It’s late and I’m rambling as I fall asleep. When I say “you don’t”, I mean that history and society are too much to bend in a deliberate way. Best you can do is the right thing at the time as best you can and not worry too much about your role in the big picture. So few people have a role that sets them at the bend of those forces.

Also, I’m not too worried about LLMs and social media, fundamentally. People have been saying and believing bizarre shit forever, they just made it easier and faster. The fading lustre of the Internet is just a drift back a bit towards before it, when people just believed stuff and then no one ever corrected them.

Thank you for getting what I was trying to say. Spot on, I don’t think the idea is wrong. It would be nice if there was a test to say “hey are you able to vote on these topics, have you researched, are you voting with your brain or with emotions?” - which is why I say the idea is fine. There isn’t though. There isn’t a single way to do that fairly or equitably.

Thank god the commenters immediately jumped down my throat to tell me what I already knew.

Considering I’m against the concept of living in hierarchical government structures, such as republics, that’s not exactly a benefit from my perspective. It just exposes the flaws of living under hierarchy.

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