A few liberal readers seem horrified --or at least dismayed --- by my belief that voting should be more difficult. They ask, "What do you want, literacy tests?"
My short answer is yes. My slightly longer answer is, I haven't a clue what is wrong with literacy tests if you take the racial connotation out of the equation. What, exactly, is so bad about the idea of expecting a certain minimal degree of education before letting citizens vote? It seems to me that literacy tests are the bare minimum. Of course they would be a logistical nightmare to implement and wholly unpractical. But as an abstract standard I simply don't get why liberals are horrified by the idea (other than the fact that it might dissuade some of their voters).
Seriously, the argument for letting ex-cons vote is that it encourages them to rejoin society as stakeholders and citizens. Okay, well, wouldn't letting only the literate vote encourage citizens, including ex-cons, to learn to read? And, isn't an informed/educated electorate better on the whole than an uninformed/uneducated one?
First off, let me just say that Jonah's contention that prohibiting less-educated people from voting would break in favor of conservatives rather than liberals doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I agree that an educated electorate is better on the whole than an uneducated one, but the place to deal with that is in public education, not at the voting booth, where you would essentially be penalizing people because they had the bad luck of being born poor and had to go to crappy schools.
It seems to me that focusing on literacy rather than, say, civics or economics, seems intentionally designed to target immigrants, many of whom vote Democratic. But really, if we're going to require tests for voting, why not an economics test? What sense does it make to require someone be able to read George W. Bush's economic plan if they don't have the knowledge of basic economics to understand that it's complete nonsense?
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"I agree that an educated electorate is better on the whole than an uneducated one, but the place to deal with that is in public education, not at the voting booth, where you would essentially be penalizing people because they had the bad luck of being born poor and had to go to crappy schools.
It seems to me that focusing on literacy rather than, say, civics or economics, seems intentionally designed to target immigrants, many of whom vote Democratic. But really, if we're going to require tests for voting, why not an economics test? What sense does it make to require someone be able to read George W. Bush's economic plan if they don't have the knowledge of basic economics to understand that it's complete nonsense?"It seems to you that focusing on illiteracy is designed to target immigrants? Is there a single part of Jonah's post or any of his articles that comes anywhere close to suggesting that illegal immigrants have anything to do with his thoughts about literacy and democracy?
No, there aren't.
I'm not sure you'd want to make it an economics test either- after all, then Paul Krugman wouldn't pass either, now would he?
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