Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A comment posted on the original article:

"It’s time to Investigate all Activities from The GOP and Tea Party and Wealthy ,Because They are The Real Terrorist Americans Citizens,For That Reason they are scare to the drones.The History from the wealthy in this country is not Very clean ,For That Reason The FBI has to Investigate This People.They Want Shut Down The Federal Government."

These people are the problem. There needs to be an IQ and political education test before people can register to vote.

Sound crazy? Yes. Extreme? Yes? Will it work? Maybe; probably not. Is it worth a shot? At the rate things are going, I'd say definitely.

By the way, expect a posting about this on rms' blog way before anybody else heard about it.

EDIT: Found another politically uneducated comment:

"You need to replace every mention of CIA with obama. HE is the one behind this crime and HE is the one 'in direct contradiction to their oath and the 4th Amendment.'"

My goodness.

EDIT: Interesting that people seem to think the only choice is blue or red. Ever heard of the Libertarian Party?

"@sjfella, seriously man, do you think Romney with his neo-con Bush advisers would have done any better with respect to maintaining of civil liberties while still hunting down terrorists? IMO, it would have been much worse under a Romney administration, we probably would have never even heard of this and they would still be doing it. The right and the neo-cons are the ones that want to throw out all our values just to fight the ‘war on terror’, hence things like the Patriot Act and Gitmo."

Please refrain from this kind of "I have a solution to politics" comments here. It's not new or interesting, nor is the resulting discussion.

I think you shouldn't be allowed to comment. Because you clearly haven't though your position out very well. Do you also support disenfranchising the mentally disabled, such as people with Down's syndrome or autism?

I work as a Deputy Returning Officer for elections in Canada. This role (simply stated) involves distributing and counting ballots at a local polling station, and ensuring the Elections Act is followed. While I do not support disenfranchising the mentally disabled from voting, it should be recognized that often its a parent, spouse, or caregiver who is the one voting and making the choice for the mentally disabled voter. This can mean they are essentially voting twice, or more if they are assisting multiple people. In one case in the last federal election, I refused to allowed a man to assist both of his children to vote, instead his wife had to assist the second child. This was within the authority of the role and there was no problem.

As long as there are some safeguards in place the mentally disabled should be allowed to vote, or make the attempt. If you sat there for a few days and saw who came out to vote, you may rather wish they too weren't having an influence on helping to elect the next government or opposition parties.

This isn't about ego or arrogance. This is about the future of the United States of America.

I do not support disenfranchising the mentally disabled. If they are politically studied enough that they can make an intelligent decision about how to vote for somebody, then of course they should be able to vote.

Why should there be a different standard for them than for anybody else? A disability doesn't mean that discrimination is an absolute certainty.

> If they are politically studied enough that they can make an intelligent decision about how to vote for somebody, then of course they should be able to vote.

You do not get to define how well "studied" someone has to be to participate in voting. Anything you find acceptable is highly politicized and guarantees voter disenfranchisement for a number of groups of people.

It makes it pretty fucking likely.

I support a skills based test like LSAT for voting. It would be much less susceptible to manipulation and op-ed than knowledge-based voting. Sure, I think someone should know the Constitution to vote, but what if someone thinks I should know the Earth is 10,000 years old?

On the other hand, a test like LSAT that proves you can figure out logical fallacies would mean the stupidest of the stupid don't get to affect my life.

Why would (s)he? One would have to assume such people are intellectually incapable. Which you seem to, since you bought them up.

If course in the OP's world, some of these people would be able to vote, others not, just like non-disabled people.

Your thinking is where the discrimination is. You have assumed such people are not equal.

Stupid voters have always been a thing in politics. That's why representatives are elected; they're supposed to be more educated and actually capable of making important decisions.

Unfortunately, the election of these representatives is very much a popularity contest, with each of the major news networks rooting for their own candidate and trying to indoctrinate as many people as possible to love their candidate and hate the opposition.

I can't see an IQ test ever being implemented. Absolutely no politician alive would want to be associated with such a measure, and the uneducated of the country would riot in fear of their rights being taken away from them.

It sounds kinda crazy, but I always thought an excellent solution would be to have a computer make political decisions. Many aspects of politics are essentially large number problems that go ignored by politicians in favor of qualitative information. We're really at the dawn of the computer age right now, and there's no reason to believe there isn't going to be a computer capable of making political decisions in the future. I can't imagine it ever taking off on Earth though; such a system would likely start as being the decision maker of some independent colony on another planet, of which it would become the standard political system for other worlds.

Despite our obvious failings, we humans are much better at making these kind of decisions than machines will be (but that gap might close; not in the any foreseeable future though).

Besides, I think the whole idea of an IQ test is ridiculous. The test itself is unreliable, and even if its not, a person with low IQ might still make a good politician. The fact that (s)he gets elected itself shows you a certain amount of inventiveness, even if its through voter fraud.

Which makes me believe that finally, protests will always have to be a part of any free society. There will always be times when the political class becomes so stupid/deattached from reality that the intelligentsia need to show them that they will not cooperate. Its unfortunate, but that does seem to be the case for now

There are also Green and Constitutionalist parties in the US. I would highly recommend looking into the three off-standard parties and seeing if your political agenda is better served by them instead of the Republicans/Democrats.

IMO there needs to be more variety of political thought in the national landscape.

>There needs to be an IQ and political education test before people can register to vote.

Would you care to expand upon this argument? What sort of test would you require, and how would such policy effect American democracy?

When you have to get a job, you can't simply get an interview with a blank resume. If you want to take the MCAT, you can't just walk in to the exam hall with zero medical knowledge.

Why shouldn't the same go for voting? Education is paramount for a good democracy. If the national education system doesn't work, even fixing it is futile because there are already so many indoctrinated and uneducated voters in the population. The best option is to weed out the uneducated ones from the educated ones.

The political education test would be similar to a test you take for naturalization: it quizzes you on the party system, how the nation was founded, what the Bill of Rights specifies, et al.

Right now the only qualification to vote is citizenship. That needs to be changed.

>Education is paramount for a good democracy

The problem is you can educate stupid people but it won't make them not stupid. By definition 50% of people are left of the mean on the IQ spectrum. By HN standards probably 80% of all people are hopeless.

When you make "being educated" a prerequisite for voting you necessarily create an underclass. You prevent people who are "undereducated", as defined by those who are "educated" (see the problem there?), from participating in society. That is, you strip them of citizenship. They are not represented.

I don't know if that's good or bad. Many argue that democracy is inherently flawed because of people's general unintelligence. I think this argument has much merit. But you can't solve the flaw within democracy itself. Which means maybe there is another, better system of governance out there, and democracy isn't the be-all and end-all we've been raised to think of it as.

Democracy isn't a good thing in and of itself, basically, so maybe we should re-evaluate.

> Many argue that democracy is inherently flawed because of people's general unintelligence.

It'd be great if elections could be fought on something more substantial than a candidate's haircut or who most people would rather drink a beer with.

I don't think that general lack of intelligence is responsible for people creating or publishing polls about drinking beer with candidates.

People get fed this tripe.

And even on HN it's hard to have political discussions. Every political thread will have some great, insightful, thoughtful, comments, and a bunch of tedious partisan bickering.

Any adequate test of people's understanding of politics and the democratic process would fail anyone who thought testing understanding of politics and the democratic process was compatible with democracy....

The essence of democracy is that you don't need a detailed understanding of the history, voter mechanics or text of a particular law to express a valid preference for or against a candidate that has something to say that concerns you, however imperfect your understanding of that candidate's intentions and their likely consequences may be. If you can't grasp that, bar yourself from the ballot box.

(and that's without discussing the obvious electoral advantages to an incumbent that might accrue from influence over setting "voter tests". Sure, you have to pass a bar to be allowed to work for somebody, or study somewhere, or borrow money - that's all for the testers' benefit)

Emotionally, I totally get you. But otherwise. . .who would decide what topics should be covered? Who would decide what the "correct" answers are? Have you heard of all the disagreements about what should go into/be taken out of school textbooks, especially those for history and social studies? Going in a slightly different direction. . .There was a time in the not-so-distant American past when there were tests like what you describe. (As well as questions about the number of bubbles in a bottle of dishwashing detergent, but I digress.) That's one of the many reasons we have the Voting Rights Act. (And yes, I know there are questions about whether or not we still need it.) Let's no go back there. But emotionally, I get it.

You shouldn't have to take a test to vote. This should be incentive for all of us to try to raise the level of education of the general public to ensure an informed electorate.

Cutting people out of the system will only result in second class citizens. We need to raise people up, not push them down.

How do you suggest we go about that?

Pay for higher education for all citizens, stop teaching to the test in primary education and actually value critical thinking. Skepticism and curiosity need to be the key tools of our society, so that people can discover for themselves what the truth is and whom they agree with politically. Education would also lead to more skilled laborers and should help us compete in the global economy.

Much of what is good about democracy comes from the balance it strikes between the need for governance and things like self determination and personal liberty.

If you have one group deciding what sort of person deserves self determination, you aren't striking that balance anymore.

It's not a bad plan, in principle.

The difficulty is - "Who gets to write the test?" Whomever controls the test has all the power. Furthermore, if inappropriate metrics for intelligence are used, you select for the wrong voters.

Our imperfect system works, even if it doesn't always work well. If you take the time to reason with people who are "the problem", things will improve. I bet you'll learn something too.

Look up "Jim Crow" in wikipedia.

Thanks. You beat me to it. I find it strange that such an elitist discussion on intelligence proved to be completely ignorant of such a well-known, well-documented, relatively recent era in American history.

You misunderstand the purpose of voting. It's not so that the people can choose the government they are subject to (that would be nice, but in practice it's difficult or impossible to implement). Rather, it's to serve as a check on tyranny.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com