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Comment by calgarymicro | Hacker News Reader

Really? If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65 (he hasn't proposed that one for some reason). Ironically enough, Vivek himself might fail the test (that he wouldn't have to take given his age), seeing as he seems to think the Constitution was ratified before the end of the Revolutionary War.[0] Given that, I wouldn't trust him to write such a test, or to appoint people to write one. So who exactly would write the test?

[0]https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/vivek-ramaswa...

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> If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65

I would agree that this is a prima facie good idea. I would say that it would be a prima facie good idea for all ages.

One would have to be pretty ignorant of history to think this would in practice be a good idea. In reality these tests would be abused to ensure certain voting populations would have a lower rate of representation.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/democracy-exhibition/vote-voi...

Bad implementations shouldn’t prevent you from toying with an idea in theory in your head. That’s just a failure of the imagination (in many cases).

But its not just a bad implementation that led to abuse, its practically every implementation was a bad implementation that led to abuse. See the White Australia policy and the Franchise and Ballot Act in South Africa for even more examples. Got any examples where such an action was actually a good thing for society and not just to repress minorities? I could probably continue coming up with more with enough thinking about it and reading history.

But hey, feel free to continue arguing for policies which historically were only implemented to suppress minorities. I'm sure it'll all go well this time.

"Toying with an idea" is fundamentally considering its real world implementation unless your toy idea is intended to only ever be just fantasy.

>If we're going to arbitrarily require a competence test for all voters under 25, then I say we should also mandate a competence test for all voters over age 65

Both those things sound good to me, though applying it universally to all ages would be preferred. And I wouldn't characterize it as 'arbitrary' necessarily- I think that if you let everyone vote without any pre-requisites at all your democratic process inevitably becomes a carnival sideshow, a shallow popularity contest where the win condition is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some baseline level of knowledge in the constituency would be a big improvement, even if we still have the unavoidable problem of 'who determines the pre-requisites' to grapple with.

Disclaimer: I know practically nothing about Vivek or any of his other positions, and this is obviously just a partisan talking point for him. But that doesn't mean the core problem being identified doesn't exist

A lack of civic knowledge among the populace is a failure of the education system, not the people themselves. If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore. 85%[0] of Americans don't know when the Constitution was written; 61% of Americans don't know the three branches of government.[1] Barring well over half of Americans from voting would not end well.

[0]https://woodrow.org/news/how-well-americans-know-constitutio...

[1]https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/americans-know-more...

They don't know these things because they don't care to know, there's no other excuse when you're living in the information age. You don't need a teacher to tell you how many branches of government there are. I agree that it's a massive failure of the education system, but not solely- there's plenty of blame to go around.

In practice I don't think 85% of Americans would be unqualified based on those stats, those numbers would improve dramatically if the incentive were there (IE. know these things or don't vote).

>If you give people the obligations of living in a democracy (paying taxes, subjecting themselves to its laws, signing up for the draft, etc.) without actually letting them participate in that democracy, then it's not a democracy anymore.

I see your point but I don't consider democracy to be a binary condition, it exists in degrees- IE. voting directly for policies vs. electing representatives to do so, etc. If one were barred from democratic participation on a permanent basis for reasons they have no control over, IE. Race/Sex, then yes democratic principles have been violated. But if all they have to do is learn some basic facts about the history of the institution they are participating in, I don't see that as 'not letting' them vote. It's more 'if you really care about voting you'll do some basic due diligence first'.

> They don't know these things because they don't care to know

Or they don't have the time or wherewithal to study for a test for whatever reason. This is the problem with trying to apply a standard to 300 million people - if 0.5% of people are the corner cases, there are 1.5 million corner cases. There are actually 14 million households in the US without internet access.[0]

> I don't see that as 'not letting' them vote. It's more 'if you really care about voting you'll do some basic due diligence first

The fact is that in order to implement this, you would have to turn away people who show up to the polls having fulfilled their end of the social contract (paying taxes, following laws, etc.). You lose the consent of the governed. And even that ignores the question of who would write and grade the test in the first place - the US has a sordid history of literacy tests being used to intentionally exclude certain groups from the franchise, and you'd have to find someone (definitely not Vivek) who could be trusted to do that job. Having the best of intentions doesn't matter when the choice of which questions to include/excluded can swing elections and disenfranchise millions.

[0]https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/internet-access-st...

>Or they don't have the time or wherewithal to study for a test for whatever reason.

Then they certainly don't have the time or wherewithal to vote as an informed constituent. They'll base their vote on an ad they saw on the TV, or blind party affiliation. What else can they do if they don't know the most basic facts about the institution they're participating in?

>The fact is that in order to implement this, you would have to turn away people who show up to the polls having fulfilled their end of the social contract (paying taxes, following laws, etc.).

In that case I would consider adding 'have basic knowledge of the democratic processes you participate in' to the social contract. It's no more onerous of a requirement than paying taxes IMO

And your point on 'who writes/grades the test' is a very valid one, as you say there is a history of using such measures for political repression. You'd have to be very careful and vigilant about setting it up in a fair and bipartisan manner, which unfortunately I have little hope for. I'm more attracted to the principle of the measure than how it'd likely play out in reality.

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