Enfranchisement in America

Posted by johnhouk on Aug 04, 2007
 John R. Houk
© August 4, 2007

What do you think about utilizing tests to qualify a citizen the ability to vote?

The Stiletto blog came across an article written by Jonah Goldberg suggesting this very same thing.

I understand the rationalization: a huge segment of eligible voters are horribly uninformed and thus indifferent to voting or vote an ideological propagandized line associated with life time familial Party association or the journalism of their favorite media.

The former is irresponsible and the later is dangerous because media and educational institutions (teachers and professors) are highly dominated by Left leaning or secular humanistic thinking. Those that are mentors in education often teach a leftist slant or dumb down civics to disinterested students.

Here is a shocker for you though: I disagree with conservative The Stiletto and Jonah Goldberg. This is my simple
 reasoning: My childhood was the late ‘50’s and the 60’s. I remember the “Jim Crow” tests that African-Americans were forced to take when they were of age to vote to qualify to vote. In the South Caucasians were given a simple test, African-American were given a test that Caucasians would even fail. The result: Whites voted and Blacks were prohibited from voting.

It is interesting to note that the Founding Fathers had the same concern about qualified voters as opposed to potential ignorant voters. Thus the Founding Fathers tagged voter eligibility to age and property ownership. If you were not a tax paying property owner, you were not able to vote. The rational was if you had the smarts to manage your property, you probably had the smarts to make informed voting decisions.

Jim Crow were racially prejudiced and property rights voting were a concern about informed privilege. The evolution of voting enfranchisement in America has done away with both.

So how does America further evolve voting so that uninformed morons (not a reference to IQ but rather to laziness) become informed responsible voters? Presenting laws to a retroactive past will cause more problems than solve them.

My thought is to provide various levels of neutral civics lessons in primary and secondary education as the best way to enable a responsible voting consciousness. Thus when a person becomes enfranchised at eighteen if the person chooses to vote (indifference factor), a person can vote responsibly according to the personal political choices. Voting enfranchisement can never return to race exclusion, wealth certification (i.e. property) or intellectual testing. These factors simply disenfranchise too many citizens.

Non-American residents (legal or illegal) are the only group of people that should be non-enfranchised in the USA. That is right: ONLY citizens should have the right to vote.

JRH
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THE DAILY BLADE: Garbage In, Garbage Out

The Stiletto (Excerpted)
August 3, 2007

Are some people simply too stupid, uninformed or mentally incompetent (second item) to vote?

Though the very idea seems "un-American," Jonah Goldberg, suggests that "[m]aybe the people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license." Goldberg notes:

A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn't know that each state gets two senators. More than two-thirds can't explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.


Goldberg hastens to add that this doesn’t mean Americans are stupid, "[r]ather, it's that millions of Americans just don't care about politics, much the same way that I don't care about cricket: They think it's boring."

No, Americans aren’t stupid – just ill served by the institutions that are supposed to educate and inform them.

Public schools are not turning out graduates who can perform basic calculations used in daily life – even using their fingers. Quick: If a pair of pants is reduced from $65.00 to $25.00 and the store takes another 15 percent off at the register, how much will you shell out for the pants†?

Even more calamitous than not being able to mentally calculate a store discount using grade-school multiplication and subtraction, a new study of 3,260 elderly patients published in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that regardless of their state of health, those who were medically illiterate – that is, unable to read prescription labels, appointment slips and instructions on how to prepare for an X-ray – were 50 percent more likely to die within the next six years than those who could read and understand medical information.

Previous studies suggest that as many as 90 million Americans are medically illiterate. These same Americans may be voting on ballot initiatives having to do with stem cell research, global warming, universal health care coverage and other contentious and complex issues.

It’s not just the piss-poor public school education indolently doled out by unionized teachers getting paid private sector middle-management level salaries (teachers average $57,354 in NY, $59,345 in CA and $61,195 in Washington, D.C. per 10-month school year - nine months if you factor in Spring and Winter breaks). Commenting on Ann Coulter’s contention that the MSM routinely gets major stories wrong The Stiletto wrote (third item):

[T]hough many journalists are college and/or journalism school graduates these days, they are too often utterly innumerate and scientifically illiterate. They simply do not have the knowledge needed, nor the analytical skills required, to understand and explain many of the controversial issues on which they are asked to report. And whatever they don’t understand, they leave out. So the resulting articles and news reports are incomplete and inaccurate - and biased.


So in addition to being unable to process mathematical, medical, scientific and technical concepts and data, Americans get their information from journalists who are equally unable to process mathematical, medical, scientific and technical concepts and data.

The inevitable result? A confused, uninformed, easily misled electorate.

Goldberg wonders whether "cheapening the vote by requiring little more than an active pulse (Chicago famously waives this rule) has turned it into something many people don't value" and suggests that "the emphasis on getting more people to vote has dumbed down our democracy by pushing participation onto people uninterested in such things."

His remedy: "Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people on the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?" And if that doesn’t work: "threaten to take the vote away from the certifiably uninformed."

If only.

[† $21.25; 15 percent of $25.00 is $3.75]
___________________________
 Enfranchisement in America
John R. Houk
© August 4, 2007
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THE DAILY BLADE: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Copyright 2006, 2007 The Stiletto. All rights reserved.

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