> [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.]
Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf
This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional:
The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")
There is an actual SCOTUS case on these tests, confirming that they indeed actually exited, see Louisiana vs. U.S. (1965).
Also this sample test (https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=940581&p=6830148) is from the Law Library of Louisiana, aka, the State Bar of Louisiana. Are you accusing the State Bar of Louisiana and the Louisiana Supreme Court of lying about the history of their state?
And this article (https://www.nola.com/news/politics/civil-rights-victory-50-y...) by NOLA actually goes through the history of the tests, citing contemporaneous reporting of the tests over several decades, though you would probably need physical access to the microfiche archives to confirm them yourself.
Unless you are suggesting that SCOTUS, SCLA, and the biggest newspaper in Louisiana are all conspiring together to make up these tests, the historical record for these tests existing is very well established.
You think it is unlikely that a famously problematic-in-terms-of-race state issued a problematic-in-terms-of-race literacy test?
Or are that just the typical high standards of proof that coincidentally pop up whenever rightwing opinions receives legitimate criticism? Standards that they themselves never even remotely hold themselves to ("my sisters aunts dog heard on facebook")?
Because the test we're talking about is comically unfair, and people were complaining in the press about multiple-choice constitutional knowledge tests that were only subtly unfair.
It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.
This one seems deliberately difficult to answer correctly, even with the requisite civics knowledge:
> The President of the Senate gets his office
> a. by election by the people.
> b. by election by the Senate.
> c. by appointment by the President.
The Vice President is the President of the Senate, but the duties are typically exercised (save the tie-breaking vote) by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a Senator chosen by whichever party currently has a majority. It seems both a. and b. could be considered correct.
The key issue and the whole purpose of that question is that also both a. and b. could be considered wrong.
If the person answers A, then the grader can state that this is correct if they like them, or assert that instead B is correct if they don't, so that the test can always provide the desired outcome.
I'd say C is the only correct answer actually. Neither the President nor his running mate are elected by the people; they're elected by the Electoral College. And the question isn't about the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
I think that's the point of these questions, to have no clear answer.
So a presidential candidate picks a vice president running mate. Voters vote for the pair. The electoral college then, usually but not always, cast votes matching the voters.
So who decided? Technically the electoral college. Who were guided by the voters. Who voted for someone the president picked.
That literacy test seems reasonable. But I do note that this particular one must predate 1942.
One of the questions is "Congress cannot regulate commerce ..." and the answer is within a state. Which I agree with, but SCOTUS does not (Wickard v Filburn, 1942).
It's definitely not reasonable. You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. There are lots of likely-disqualifiers mixed in with the gimmes like "Who is the first president?".
Even "who is the first president" knowledge shouldn't be a bar to voting. Do you think they offered this literacy test in the native languages of all taking it? Do you think all people in the US had the opportunity to learn, in their language, the history of the country?
At the time there were systemic barriers to education that meant that many folk were probably not even taught who the first president was. Let alone how old you have to be to be president.
I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.
In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times.
What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
The problem isn't necessarily voter registration per se, but how easy or hard you make it. Giving politicians or bureaucrats the power to disenfranchise voters by requiring jumping through seemingly arbitrary hoops or based on vague rules will always lead to abuse.
In many countries if you are a citizen (or permanent resident, depending on the election), old enough, and registered as living in the country you are automatically registered to vote. No need to do anything, your form shows up in the mail before every election. The only times you might have to do something is if you've very recently moved to a different part of the country or if you live abroad.
It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
That requires some preparation. Example: in Italy the state knows where everybody live (this is self reported but it could be inferred in many ways) and, more importantly for this case, where everybody has residence (that might not be the correct English word, sorry.)
I could have residence in a city because I was born there but I could live in another one because for one year I have to work in that other city. But I don't sell my home, terminate contracts with utilities etc, also because maybe I go back home once or twice per month to visit friends and parents. Ok, so when I have to vote I do it in my city of residence, in a given place and not in any other one, and I have a card that I have to present together with my photo id. They have a register with the voters that are expected to vote there and they check my name on the list, stamp my card, give me the ballot.
Note that this is a process that starts when one is born and keeps going through all the life of a person. It's quite an effort but it makes participating to elections very low effort for a voter. If we had to register to vote... Who would vote, only very interested people. It's amazing that so many people vote in the USA given the process.
> you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public?
I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.
Some time ago every election or referendum simply put a stamp in the passport when voting, but that was before plastic ID cards. Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers; this also reports your ID for the invalidation of any pre-election votes (e.g. mail-in ballots) elsewhere.
You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.
And indeed, the way it's done somewhere else on this planet is you show up, vote, get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll and vote a second time, and that's all there is to that.
In places with more modern technology, instead of relying on ink on thumbs, we can just have a computerized system informing all the voting precincts that John Doe has now voted at Precinct X, perhaps with a face photo in case someone alleges fraud.
It's possible. It was designed to be. It was used because southern Blacks actually did have a lower literacy rate than Whites at the time and this was seen as the most expedient "filter" they could create.
The real racism was in all the ways to bypass the test. Grandfather clauses, land ownership clauses, "demonstrated understanding" options. Most White people challenged by the test wouldn't ever need to actually confront it.
These weren't the only requirements either. You had to be of "good character" and "understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government" and to be able to "read _and_ write."
Finally even if you were Black and managed all of this it wasn't at all a guarantee that your registration or vote would be accepted. Sometimes this understanding would be communicated in an act of violence.
The test is a tiny archival curiosity created by a much more overt system.
That comment is a reflection of my pedantry and I don't think we're actually disagreeing.
It's not possible to know the right answers because there never were any. This means the test has no predictive power, not that it's impossible, and again, since some Whites unable to prove education did have to contend with this, it was designed that way intentionally.
I feel "near impossible literacy test" is a terrible description. The "intentionally ambiguous literacy test" would be more apt.
More worrying is I am unable to find a definitive provenance for this document. It suggests it was used in the early 1900s but the print quality and format seems unusual in several ways to me. Which is why I attempted to reduce it in favor of considering the rest of the system.
The reason that it is impossible is that there is no possible set of answers that would require the test-giver to acknowledge that a test-taker passed the test. Anyone the test-taker does not like can be failed.
That's the point. Have you never applied for any sort of license or permit or anything that the government agency really doesn't want to hand out? They're all structured and written this way.
Prior to the ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen putting a stop to the practice the LTC application processes in the less permissive towns in Massachusetts were well known to have forms of this sort in addition to the basic state form as well as undocumented "soft requirements" and "nice to haves". In Boston proper you basically had to write an essay, or maybe that was Cambridge, I forget.
Meanwhile I'm wondering what 'draw a line around' something means, when they use circle in other parts. If they meant circle, they'd have said circle, no?
It's debatable whether "1." is part of the sentence (and thus should be left alone). We wouldn't consider a non-alphanumeric bullet point to be part of a sentence.
Regardless of which you chose, if the examiner wished to disqualify you, they could simply say it's the opposite.
That is wrong and you have failed the test. If you include the . you have clearly misunderstood the question. It did not indicate to draw a line around the number or letter and dot. Since you included the dot we will fail you. We are aware the question did not indicate the dot or not and it doesn’t matter. You failed, bye!
I don't argue that it's impossible for the examiner to screw you on the commas — that's always a possibility with an open-ended question. And yet this doesn't make all open-ended questions bad, it just makes then inappropriate for a situation with an adversarial interviewer (which I do agree include the voting process).
However I argue that the question by itself is fine: it is well defined and has only one reasonable answer. No one presented any other sensible answer so far.
Both "backwards" and "forwards" could be correctly interpreted as the adverb in this one. It could be asking you to "Spell the word backwards, in a forwards manner" or "Spell in a backwards manner, the word forwards".
It's ambiguous enough that someone grading the test who wanted the disqualify you could make the case you got it wrong, no matter if you wrote "backwards" or "sdrawrof".
> 28. Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.
I have no idea what a curved horizontal line is. A horizontal line is parallel to the X axis of the XY plane and has no curvature.
I know, from a human rights point of view, this is very problematic. But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote.
Of course, those tests shouldn't be that ambiguous, but if they were phrased a bit more clear, these would be very simple. At the same time, English has changed in the last 50 years. That phrasing might have been common back then.
Australia had something similar to implement its "White Australia" policy. Apparently, British authorities objected to explicitly racist rules. So the scheme they came up with was that the border officials could, at their discretion, ask somebody coming into the country to pass a dictation test to prove their literacy. The test could be administered in any European language. Very few people managed to pass. Details:
And the immigration officer could pick the language you were to be tested in.
Which led to one account I read of an immigrant who was polyglot with an interest in different languages. He could handle all of the languages the officer tried, until Welsh.
As I recall, this ended up in court, where the judge allowed the immigration, and pointed out that none of the immigration officers could understand Welsh themselves.
The person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and who the Australian government found far too 'revolutionary' to let in.
The full story is quite fun. He was initially refused permission to disembark, which he solved by leaping five metres from the ship, thereby making landfall (rather literally). The government then tried to exclude him using a dictation test, which could indeed be in any European language, and the test he failed was administered in Scots Gaelic. Some controversy arose when it turned out that the person giving the dictation test couldn't themselves understand Scots Gaelic, but the High Court ultimately ruled in Kisch's favour for the somewhat amusing reason that Scots Gaelic was 'not a European language' (at least within the meaning of the relevant law). [0]
Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions. Laws banning non-white migration persisted in one way or another until 1973, and in the subsequent fifty years Australia has done progressively more insane things to keep people out, including removing all of Australia from the Australian migration zone (so migrants never actually 'arrive' in such a way that might give them a right to seek asylum), using the navy to put people that arrived by sea back on boats and launching them vaguely in the direction of other countries, keeping people actually accepted to be refugees (!) off-shore in remote Pacific island concentration camps for years, and - during COVID - criminalising its own citizens leaving Australia for two years (and briefly even the return of Australian citizens home). [1]
> Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions.
A joke I sometimes tell during conversations when australia comes up:
"You know, Australia is a great country so I once was thinking of migrating there. So I called the australian embassy. First thing they ask me is if I have a criminal record. So I answered oh I'm sorry, I didn't know that was still a requirement, and hung up."
Even if you pretend that questions are just accidentally ambiguous, the difference is that subjects are supposed to answer 30 questions in 10 minutes with zero mistakes. This is deliberate and virtually impossible to accomplish.
While several of these questions are poorly designed and some might even have typos, it’s much more telling to see what the scoring guide says. If the key has built-in leniency for different interpretations, and was rushed out then the test is not as bad.
But given that tests like these for their purpose carry serious impact in democracy, the test should not have been rushed, and made sure to be correct and relevant, which points to the conclusion that it was made to exclude people and that maybe the scorers looked at the names of people and where they lived as part of the determination, making it easy to nix an applicant based on bogus ambiguous questions.
What a strange idea for someone from Germany. Here you are registered as a citizen and get a letter to your registered address and you take that to the voting station. Vote. Done.
Leaving aside the topics of authenticity and the questions' historical context, it's interesting that the article claims that "most" of the questions are impossible, while >80% have a single clear interpretation. For example, "draw a line under the last word in this line."
A that point you might as well flip off whoever it is you're grading, and I get that this is the point of the test, but it's hardly the questions fault. The question has one clear answer.
I get that the idea is that some questions create ambiguity using wordplay or subjectivity, but do you really think this is one of them? Your examples seem like a stretch even in the context of being unfair on purpose.
Feels like one of those psychological tests used to induce stress before evaluating other tasks (knowing the person is on edge).
Any test that needs 100% accuracy to pass when you are under pressure, filling ambiguous and unimportant questions, is simply bullshit. It's design to make you fail at will if you think about it. Even one ambiguous question is sufficient to fail an otherwise perfect submission: just say the answer was the other way around.
Wow, I hadn't even thought of that for that question. Disgustingly genius. The person administering the test can simply tell the person who took the test the opposite interpretation of however they answered, and that's it for their ability to vote.
A prime example of why "unionization" is good: You only need two people to do this differently and be told the opposite by the administrator (preferably the same one but not necessarily) and you've proved that it's BS.
That's all theory of course and in practice I bet people did talk about this afterwards and figured out it's BS and it didn't help either way. But it's easy to "find out" (and then try to do something about it) if you stick together. But if nobody sticks together on it and tries to do better for themselves by themselves, everyone does worse for themselves in the end.
Great, and now that you realize this you also realize why all these other right-wing schemes to suppress the vote are also unconstitutional. If you put some random jerk in a position to deny someone the right to vote based on ID card or signature rules, you have created a system for discriminatory disenfranchisement.
It’s awkward, sure, but other questions use commas in that way. Question 19, immediately prior:
> Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle
draw a circle with a black dot in it.
In that case, “a square with a triangle in it” is fairly unambiguously the object, which would make the sentence construction “[verb] [adverb], [object]” — exactly the same as the second interpretation of “Spell backwards, forwards”.
But, my understanding is that the test is purposefully opaque, so that any answer can be considered “wrong”, at the discretion of whoever’s running the test.
There are many ambiguous ones, but several here that are unambiguously wrong.
14, 15, 16 that others pointed out.
24. They printed 3 words when a single word was called for. The test is very clear about following the direction exactly, no more and no less. Also "mom" might be wrong, "wow" should be safe.
28. The vertical line is bisected in clearly unequal parts.
Their answer to #14 is wrong. The first part ("draw a line under the first letter after 'h'") is done correctly, with a line under "i", but the second part ("draw a line through the second letter after "j") is wrong. They should have drawn the line through "l", but they drew it through "m".
At first I thought "oh, they're just using a slightly different, but perhaps reasonable, meaning of "second letter after". But if that's the case, then they used a different meaning of "first letter after" for the first part.
#16 is also wrong: it calls for a black circle overlapping the left corner of a triangle, but they drew it overlapping the right corner.
And for #25, they wrote it out, but all of it did not fit on the line, and did not write the terminating ":" in the text, so that's technically incorrect too. (And it's debatable whether or not they were supposed to write out the text that's inside the triangle, or the "gotcha" of writing out the text in the question.)
I love that they gave up for the last two questions. I imagine most people who were forced to take that test did so too, assuming they even made it that far in the allotted time.
Question 29 is particularly cruel - even if someone somehow managed to provide "good" answers for the preceding 28 questions within ten minutes, then they were surely almost out of time, and just parsing that sentence took me about four readings.
It doesn't have answers for the last two and I think the number 16 is wrong (the circle is encircling the right corner). Also 25 doesn't fit on the line.
Would be interested to see what share of population would get all of those correct (if it's even possible). I for one wouldn't.
And the person who answered wrote the last two words such that they're not "on the line provided", so regardless of which phrase they're supposed to write, they got the question wrong.
Assuming they did write the correct thing, and assuming the test administrator would be unusually generous about the placement of the words, they still got it wrong: they left off the colon at the end.
This very same cynical and manipulative approach is used today by many apps, websites, forms, data harvesters, data resellers, marketers, tech companies, and governments - with the same basic purpose.
I think the weight of your vote should come from the amount of taxes you pay, up to some cap. Can someone explain to me like I’m 12 why this is a bad idea?
1. The richest 1% vote whoever makes them even richer, at the expense of all the other 99% poorer than them.
2. The other 99% people no longer play the "democracy" game with the rich, form their own government without the "voting power corresponds to how much tax paid".
3. The rich people country loses its foundation, thus can no longer sustain. The rich join the poor people country.
Beyond anything else, intentionally designing a political system around disenfranchising a class of people seems like a bad idea from a human rights standpoint. You're creating a system in which the wealthier citizens can systematically take the rights away from the poor. I think you know how that can go wrong considering you're asking this question specifically on this post out of all posts.
The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.
It’s interesting how actual black people find even the idea that it’s harder for them to get IDs (or that they don’t know how to get them) racist, one example: https://youtu.be/DCytgANu010?feature=shared
Voter id is so far from this. You might have to jump through hoops to get an ID, but with literacy tests it was almost impossible for blacks to register.
In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card.
Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice.
Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family?
Germany, by contrast, requires every resident to register in the city or town they live in for an ID, whether they intend to vote or not, but even small towns have such an office, and as someone else pointed out, every citizen receives a letter 30 days before each election telling them exactly who/what is being voted on, where they are to go on Election Day (always a Sunday), and how to vote absentee if they’re not going to be in town that day.
Like many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc.
It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent.
It certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally.
Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner.
To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
It absolutely is. Go look at the racial demographics of the neighborhoods where DMVs are being opened and closed. And then ask yourself which racial groups, at large, are more likely to have time in their day to sit at an inconveniently located DMV and what party they most often vote for.
We've removed some of the structural racism, but we've also gotten much better at hiding and "justifying" it.
Additionally, think about all the votes that were passed when these tests were present. Every one of those votes meant a huge and consistent portion of the population could not participate. Which probably created a situation where that population was at a disadvantage across many systems.
Even if they stopped doing this test in 19XX, it would take a significant amount of time to unwind not only the unfair policies enacted under it but also the damage done by those policies to families. We might still be undoing the damae from them.
A similar case is redlining -- city policies that forced immigrant and minority populations to live in certain areas, limiting those family's abilities to participate in the growth of housing value. A couple generations cannot accrue value from their homes, because they've been forced to live in a low value area. Even once redlining became illegal, those families were 60 years behind in an exponential growth curve. Fixing the policy is a great start, as was removing these tests, but we need to do more to actually make things right.
The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is still very much being felt in the present, as waves and ripples from past decisions and policies led to inequal financial and social outcomes that take generations to repair (if they ever can be repaired.)
No, this is incorrect. This has not been the case for 60 years now. These tests were discontinued as part of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That information is in the linked article, which is short and only takes a minute to read.
This example was also far from universal, certainly across the entire USA but even in Louisiana.
edit: reading other comments, it isn't clear whether this information is even true for a small subset of Louisiana 60+ years ago
Voting rights in parts of America before the Voting Rights Act depended on passing an arbitrary test that differed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and may or may not have measured literacy and civics knowledge… if you were black (or native American, depending on state). You could be a well-regarded English literature professor at a black college and still have to subject yourself to what you knew was a farce being administered by someone far less literate than you in order to attempt to vote.
If you were white (“your grandfather could vote”), you were usually exempt, even if you could barely sign your name on your voter registration.
Note: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm:
> [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.]
Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf
This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...
The original Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...
The follow-up, in which the author chronicles their (unsuccessful) search for an original: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-....
The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")
Right, and you'd assume that if it was widely delivered in Louisiana, there'd be contemporaneous records; what that test is doing is pretty obvious.
There is an actual SCOTUS case on these tests, confirming that they indeed actually exited, see Louisiana vs. U.S. (1965).
Also this sample test (https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=940581&p=6830148) is from the Law Library of Louisiana, aka, the State Bar of Louisiana. Are you accusing the State Bar of Louisiana and the Louisiana Supreme Court of lying about the history of their state?
And this article (https://www.nola.com/news/politics/civil-rights-victory-50-y...) by NOLA actually goes through the history of the tests, citing contemporaneous reporting of the tests over several decades, though you would probably need physical access to the microfiche archives to confirm them yourself.
Unless you are suggesting that SCOTUS, SCLA, and the biggest newspaper in Louisiana are all conspiring together to make up these tests, the historical record for these tests existing is very well established.
The question is whether the test in the article is a real example of a literacy test, not whether literacy tests existed.
You think it is unlikely that a famously problematic-in-terms-of-race state issued a problematic-in-terms-of-race literacy test?
Or are that just the typical high standards of proof that coincidentally pop up whenever rightwing opinions receives legitimate criticism? Standards that they themselves never even remotely hold themselves to ("my sisters aunts dog heard on facebook")?
No, they don't think that. The previous commenter simply misread my comment.
Why would you assume that?
Because the test we're talking about is comically unfair, and people were complaining in the press about multiple-choice constitutional knowledge tests that were only subtly unfair.
It's interesting that the Slate and crmvet pieces have updates about the search for authenticity, but this piece published today doesn't mention it.
It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.
I think it's surprising because the piece is new and it links to the Slate and crmvet articles.
Right, but they're rehashing coverage they had of this exact test 10 years ago.
This one seems deliberately difficult to answer correctly, even with the requisite civics knowledge:
> The President of the Senate gets his office
> a. by election by the people.
> b. by election by the Senate.
> c. by appointment by the President.
The Vice President is the President of the Senate, but the duties are typically exercised (save the tie-breaking vote) by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a Senator chosen by whichever party currently has a majority. It seems both a. and b. could be considered correct.
The key issue and the whole purpose of that question is that also both a. and b. could be considered wrong.
If the person answers A, then the grader can state that this is correct if they like them, or assert that instead B is correct if they don't, so that the test can always provide the desired outcome.
I'd argue even C could be seen as correct. The president chooses his running mate, after all.
C is also literally what happens if a new VP is needed for any reason (needs to get confirmed by Congress though).
I'd say C is the only correct answer actually. Neither the President nor his running mate are elected by the people; they're elected by the Electoral College. And the question isn't about the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
I think that's the point of these questions, to have no clear answer.
So a presidential candidate picks a vice president running mate. Voters vote for the pair. The electoral college then, usually but not always, cast votes matching the voters.
So who decided? Technically the electoral college. Who were guided by the voters. Who voted for someone the president picked.
The answer key is included, and the correct answer according to the test is indeed "the people".
That literacy test seems reasonable. But I do note that this particular one must predate 1942.
One of the questions is "Congress cannot regulate commerce ..." and the answer is within a state. Which I agree with, but SCOTUS does not (Wickard v Filburn, 1942).
It's definitely not reasonable. You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. There are lots of likely-disqualifiers mixed in with the gimmes like "Who is the first president?".
Agreed. This test is not reasonable.
Even "who is the first president" knowledge shouldn't be a bar to voting. Do you think they offered this literacy test in the native languages of all taking it? Do you think all people in the US had the opportunity to learn, in their language, the history of the country?
At the time there were systemic barriers to education that meant that many folk were probably not even taught who the first president was. Let alone how old you have to be to be president.
> That literacy test seems reasonable
Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.
I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.
In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times.
What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
The problem isn't necessarily voter registration per se, but how easy or hard you make it. Giving politicians or bureaucrats the power to disenfranchise voters by requiring jumping through seemingly arbitrary hoops or based on vague rules will always lead to abuse.
In many countries if you are a citizen (or permanent resident, depending on the election), old enough, and registered as living in the country you are automatically registered to vote. No need to do anything, your form shows up in the mail before every election. The only times you might have to do something is if you've very recently moved to a different part of the country or if you live abroad.
It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
That requires some preparation. Example: in Italy the state knows where everybody live (this is self reported but it could be inferred in many ways) and, more importantly for this case, where everybody has residence (that might not be the correct English word, sorry.)
I could have residence in a city because I was born there but I could live in another one because for one year I have to work in that other city. But I don't sell my home, terminate contracts with utilities etc, also because maybe I go back home once or twice per month to visit friends and parents. Ok, so when I have to vote I do it in my city of residence, in a given place and not in any other one, and I have a card that I have to present together with my photo id. They have a register with the voters that are expected to vote there and they check my name on the list, stamp my card, give me the ballot.
Note that this is a process that starts when one is born and keeps going through all the life of a person. It's quite an effort but it makes participating to elections very low effort for a voter. If we had to register to vote... Who would vote, only very interested people. It's amazing that so many people vote in the USA given the process.
> you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.
Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public?
I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.
Some time ago every election or referendum simply put a stamp in the passport when voting, but that was before plastic ID cards. Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers; this also reports your ID for the invalidation of any pre-election votes (e.g. mail-in ballots) elsewhere.
You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.
And indeed, the way it's done somewhere else on this planet is you show up, vote, get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll and vote a second time, and that's all there is to that.
In places with more modern technology, instead of relying on ink on thumbs, we can just have a computerized system informing all the voting precincts that John Doe has now voted at Precinct X, perhaps with a face photo in case someone alleges fraud.
Well good luck voting-out the government that controls that system.
It may be from after 1942 and the "correct" answer is simply wrong.
It's possible. It was designed to be. It was used because southern Blacks actually did have a lower literacy rate than Whites at the time and this was seen as the most expedient "filter" they could create.
The real racism was in all the ways to bypass the test. Grandfather clauses, land ownership clauses, "demonstrated understanding" options. Most White people challenged by the test wouldn't ever need to actually confront it.
These weren't the only requirements either. You had to be of "good character" and "understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government" and to be able to "read _and_ write."
Finally even if you were Black and managed all of this it wasn't at all a guarantee that your registration or vote would be accepted. Sometimes this understanding would be communicated in an act of violence.
The test is a tiny archival curiosity created by a much more overt system.
It's not possible. Several of the questions have multiple valid answers. It's pretty obvious what the scheme is.
That comment is a reflection of my pedantry and I don't think we're actually disagreeing.
It's not possible to know the right answers because there never were any. This means the test has no predictive power, not that it's impossible, and again, since some Whites unable to prove education did have to contend with this, it was designed that way intentionally.
I feel "near impossible literacy test" is a terrible description. The "intentionally ambiguous literacy test" would be more apt.
More worrying is I am unable to find a definitive provenance for this document. It suggests it was used in the early 1900s but the print quality and format seems unusual in several ways to me. Which is why I attempted to reduce it in favor of considering the rest of the system.
The reason that it is impossible is that there is no possible set of answers that would require the test-giver to acknowledge that a test-taker passed the test. Anyone the test-taker does not like can be failed.
That's the point. Have you never applied for any sort of license or permit or anything that the government agency really doesn't want to hand out? They're all structured and written this way.
Cite an example? This claim seems extraordinary, since people will sue over almost any process any local, state, or federal government creates.
Prior to the ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen putting a stop to the practice the LTC application processes in the less permissive towns in Massachusetts were well known to have forms of this sort in addition to the basic state form as well as undocumented "soft requirements" and "nice to haves". In Boston proper you basically had to write an essay, or maybe that was Cambridge, I forget.
"Impossible" is apt, because it is not possible to answer all the questions on the test in an unambiguously, objectively correct manner.
"Impossible" also refers to how the test administrators used it: in order to make voter registration impossible for some people.
> That comment is a reflection of my pedantry
Stop with this sort of thing, please. It's just noise, and doesn't add to the discussion.
Which question(s)? They all seem to have single answers to me.
That being said, I would expect to fail this test.
The first question I see is:
1. Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence.
I have no idea what "the number of this sentence" or "the letter of this sentence" even means.
Meanwhile I'm wondering what 'draw a line around' something means, when they use circle in other parts. If they meant circle, they'd have said circle, no?
I thought the "number or letter" in that sentence is the "a" in "Draw a line".
You need to draw a line around the "1." part
It's debatable whether "1." is part of the sentence (and thus should be left alone). We wouldn't consider a non-alphanumeric bullet point to be part of a sentence.
Regardless of which you chose, if the examiner wished to disqualify you, they could simply say it's the opposite.
No one says it's a part of the sentence. It's a number of the sentence, as in "this is the sentence number one".
Number OR Letter, and it never specifies which one. It doesn't say first or last, or anything.
"1" is the number of the sentence, not a number in the sentence. As in "this is the sentence number one".
I don't claim this test is useful, but as a matter of fact the first question is not hard.
That is wrong and you have failed the test. If you include the . you have clearly misunderstood the question. It did not indicate to draw a line around the number or letter and dot. Since you included the dot we will fail you. We are aware the question did not indicate the dot or not and it doesn’t matter. You failed, bye!
I don't argue that it's impossible for the examiner to screw you on the commas — that's always a possibility with an open-ended question. And yet this doesn't make all open-ended questions bad, it just makes then inappropriate for a situation with an adversarial interviewer (which I do agree include the voting process).
However I argue that the question by itself is fine: it is well defined and has only one reasonable answer. No one presented any other sensible answer so far.
Good luck drawing a line around anything except a point at infinity.
"Paris in the spring" is the one I fixated on, but lots of other examples downthread.
Heheh, no voting for you!
It's "Paris in the the spring", with two the's!
"Spell backwards, forwards"
Both "backwards" and "forwards" could be correctly interpreted as the adverb in this one. It could be asking you to "Spell the word backwards, in a forwards manner" or "Spell in a backwards manner, the word forwards".
It's ambiguous enough that someone grading the test who wanted the disqualify you could make the case you got it wrong, no matter if you wrote "backwards" or "sdrawrof".
eg...
> 28. Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.
I have no idea what a curved horizontal line is. A horizontal line is parallel to the X axis of the XY plane and has no curvature.
Ironically, if you don't have fair elections, then you don't have a republic.
I know, from a human rights point of view, this is very problematic. But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote.
Of course, those tests shouldn't be that ambiguous, but if they were phrased a bit more clear, these would be very simple. At the same time, English has changed in the last 50 years. That phrasing might have been common back then.
Imagine what would happen if you put a "who won the US 2020 election?" question on the form.
In a similar vein, linked are math questions Russian universities would give to Jewish students to filter them out in entrance exams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
Australia had something similar to implement its "White Australia" policy. Apparently, British authorities objected to explicitly racist rules. So the scheme they came up with was that the border officials could, at their discretion, ask somebody coming into the country to pass a dictation test to prove their literacy. The test could be administered in any European language. Very few people managed to pass. Details:
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-aust...
> any European language
And the immigration officer could pick the language you were to be tested in.
Which led to one account I read of an immigrant who was polyglot with an interest in different languages. He could handle all of the languages the officer tried, until Welsh.
As I recall, this ended up in court, where the judge allowed the immigration, and pointed out that none of the immigration officers could understand Welsh themselves.
The person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and who the Australian government found far too 'revolutionary' to let in.
The full story is quite fun. He was initially refused permission to disembark, which he solved by leaping five metres from the ship, thereby making landfall (rather literally). The government then tried to exclude him using a dictation test, which could indeed be in any European language, and the test he failed was administered in Scots Gaelic. Some controversy arose when it turned out that the person giving the dictation test couldn't themselves understand Scots Gaelic, but the High Court ultimately ruled in Kisch's favour for the somewhat amusing reason that Scots Gaelic was 'not a European language' (at least within the meaning of the relevant law). [0]
Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions. Laws banning non-white migration persisted in one way or another until 1973, and in the subsequent fifty years Australia has done progressively more insane things to keep people out, including removing all of Australia from the Australian migration zone (so migrants never actually 'arrive' in such a way that might give them a right to seek asylum), using the navy to put people that arrived by sea back on boats and launching them vaguely in the direction of other countries, keeping people actually accepted to be refugees (!) off-shore in remote Pacific island concentration camps for years, and - during COVID - criminalising its own citizens leaving Australia for two years (and briefly even the return of Australian citizens home). [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Ki...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052
> Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions.
A joke I sometimes tell during conversations when australia comes up:
"You know, Australia is a great country so I once was thinking of migrating there. So I called the australian embassy. First thing they ask me is if I have a criminal record. So I answered oh I'm sorry, I didn't know that was still a requirement, and hung up."
Thank you so much for the details! I got the island right but the wrong Celtic language, which caused my searches to fail.
[flagged]
How are this tests different from most of the exercise books for the 5th grade published around that time?
Even if you pretend that questions are just accidentally ambiguous, the difference is that subjects are supposed to answer 30 questions in 10 minutes with zero mistakes. This is deliberate and virtually impossible to accomplish.
While several of these questions are poorly designed and some might even have typos, it’s much more telling to see what the scoring guide says. If the key has built-in leniency for different interpretations, and was rushed out then the test is not as bad.
But given that tests like these for their purpose carry serious impact in democracy, the test should not have been rushed, and made sure to be correct and relevant, which points to the conclusion that it was made to exclude people and that maybe the scorers looked at the names of people and where they lived as part of the determination, making it easy to nix an applicant based on bogus ambiguous questions.
Certain politicians who refuse to take cognitive abilities tests would probably not pass this one.
What a strange idea for someone from Germany. Here you are registered as a citizen and get a letter to your registered address and you take that to the voting station. Vote. Done.
Because, yes Germany has always been fair, democratic and non discriminating.
Leaving aside the topics of authenticity and the questions' historical context, it's interesting that the article claims that "most" of the questions are impossible, while >80% have a single clear interpretation. For example, "draw a line under the last word in this line."
“one wrong answer denotes failure of the test”
Yeah? Which word do you draw the line under?
Is there a word trick here I'm missing? I can only interpret it in the face-value sense of underlining the last word, "line".
Sorry, no votes for you; it was "word".
No, wait, you needed to underline every occurrence of the word "line".
Again, no idea if this test is real, just, that's the gimmick.
A that point you might as well flip off whoever it is you're grading, and I get that this is the point of the test, but it's hardly the questions fault. The question has one clear answer.
I get that the idea is that some questions create ambiguity using wordplay or subjectivity, but do you really think this is one of them? Your examples seem like a stretch even in the context of being unfair on purpose.
Feels like one of those psychological tests used to induce stress before evaluating other tasks (knowing the person is on edge).
Any test that needs 100% accuracy to pass when you are under pressure, filling ambiguous and unimportant questions, is simply bullshit. It's design to make you fail at will if you think about it. Even one ambiguous question is sufficient to fail an otherwise perfect submission: just say the answer was the other way around.
I’m curious if anyone has the solutions to these.
The point is that the questions are phrased ambiguously such that a reviewer can credibly claim that a "correct" solution is wrong.
Take question 20:
> Spell backwards, forwards
Is "backwards" the object, with "forwards" describing how to spell it — as in, "Spell the word 'backwards', forwards"?
Or is it being used as an adverb, telling you how to spell the word "forwards" — as in, "Spell backwards the word 'forwards'"?
Wow, I hadn't even thought of that for that question. Disgustingly genius. The person administering the test can simply tell the person who took the test the opposite interpretation of however they answered, and that's it for their ability to vote.
It reminds me of the Simpsons episode with the spelling bee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sn5wyBDxn4
> "Your word is 'weather'."
> "Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?"
> "Certainly! 'I don't know whether the weather will improve.'"
(obviously the joke doesn't work as well written out)
Also the Simpsons scene with the Smokey Bear statue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-q-3fPYw_Y
> "Only who can prevent forest fires?" [You] [Me]
> Bart selects "You".
> "You pressed 'You', referring to me. That is incorrect. The correct answer is 'You'!"
"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
What's even worse about this is this test wasn't given to everyone who wanted to vote, only those who gained their right to vote after the civil war.
White people were "grandfathered" in, literally.
A prime example of why "unionization" is good: You only need two people to do this differently and be told the opposite by the administrator (preferably the same one but not necessarily) and you've proved that it's BS.
That's all theory of course and in practice I bet people did talk about this afterwards and figured out it's BS and it didn't help either way. But it's easy to "find out" (and then try to do something about it) if you stick together. But if nobody sticks together on it and tries to do better for themselves by themselves, everyone does worse for themselves in the end.
> But it's easy to "find out" (and then try to do something about it) if you stick together.
You're kind of describing the civil rights movement.
And forgetting the KKK
Great, and now that you realize this you also realize why all these other right-wing schemes to suppress the vote are also unconstitutional. If you put some random jerk in a position to deny someone the right to vote based on ID card or signature rules, you have created a system for discriminatory disenfranchisement.
I think I've already got a pretty good handle on the modern-day disenfranchisement techniques, thank you.
With the comma the second interpretation seems inapplicable to me.
It’s awkward, sure, but other questions use commas in that way. Question 19, immediately prior:
> Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle draw a circle with a black dot in it.
In that case, “a square with a triangle in it” is fairly unambiguously the object, which would make the sentence construction “[verb] [adverb], [object]” — exactly the same as the second interpretation of “Spell backwards, forwards”.
It seems inapplicable to you, but it will probably seem very applicable to the test administrator who doesn’t want people like you voting.
Kind of like modern App Store review. Google must have employed some history majors
A solution is available here: https://mrsjcoonan.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/2/23625108/liter...
But, my understanding is that the test is purposefully opaque, so that any answer can be considered “wrong”, at the discretion of whoever’s running the test.
There are many ambiguous ones, but several here that are unambiguously wrong.
14, 15, 16 that others pointed out.
24. They printed 3 words when a single word was called for. The test is very clear about following the direction exactly, no more and no less. Also "mom" might be wrong, "wow" should be safe.
28. The vertical line is bisected in clearly unequal parts.
Their answer to #14 is wrong. The first part ("draw a line under the first letter after 'h'") is done correctly, with a line under "i", but the second part ("draw a line through the second letter after "j") is wrong. They should have drawn the line through "l", but they drew it through "m".
At first I thought "oh, they're just using a slightly different, but perhaps reasonable, meaning of "second letter after". But if that's the case, then they used a different meaning of "first letter after" for the first part.
#16 is also wrong: it calls for a black circle overlapping the left corner of a triangle, but they drew it overlapping the right corner.
And for #25, they wrote it out, but all of it did not fit on the line, and did not write the terminating ":" in the text, so that's technically incorrect too. (And it's debatable whether or not they were supposed to write out the text that's inside the triangle, or the "gotcha" of writing out the text in the question.)
I love that they gave up for the last two questions. I imagine most people who were forced to take that test did so too, assuming they even made it that far in the allotted time.
Question 29 is particularly cruel - even if someone somehow managed to provide "good" answers for the preceding 28 questions within ten minutes, then they were surely almost out of time, and just parsing that sentence took me about four readings.
On 15, shouldn't the dot be above the O?
Also true!
Their answer to #14 is wrong. They crossed out "m" and should've crossed out "l".
#8 is wrong, T should be crossed out because it's the first letter of "the alphabet".
#18 is wrong, after the 15 comes 18, so 18 should be written in the blank space.
Bastards.
It doesn't have answers for the last two and I think the number 16 is wrong (the circle is encircling the right corner). Also 25 doesn't fit on the line.
Would be interested to see what share of population would get all of those correct (if it's even possible). I for one wouldn't.
Sadistic stuff.
What's the right answer to "Write down on the line provided, what you read in the triangle below"? The triangle contains "Paris in the spring".
Actually: Paris in the the spring
'the' comes twice
That's diabolical. But it's not certain if even that's correct. Depends on how the comma should be interpreted.
And the person who answered wrote the last two words such that they're not "on the line provided", so regardless of which phrase they're supposed to write, they got the question wrong.
Assuming they did write the correct thing, and assuming the test administrator would be unusually generous about the placement of the words, they still got it wrong: they left off the colon at the end.
It’s not a real test.
This very same cynical and manipulative approach is used today by many apps, websites, forms, data harvesters, data resellers, marketers, tech companies, and governments - with the same basic purpose.
I think the weight of your vote should come from the amount of taxes you pay, up to some cap. Can someone explain to me like I’m 12 why this is a bad idea?
1. The richest 1% vote whoever makes them even richer, at the expense of all the other 99% poorer than them. 2. The other 99% people no longer play the "democracy" game with the rich, form their own government without the "voting power corresponds to how much tax paid". 3. The rich people country loses its foundation, thus can no longer sustain. The rich join the poor people country.
Beyond anything else, intentionally designing a political system around disenfranchising a class of people seems like a bad idea from a human rights standpoint. You're creating a system in which the wealthier citizens can systematically take the rights away from the poor. I think you know how that can go wrong considering you're asking this question specifically on this post out of all posts.
Disenfranchising all the retirees would certainly shake up politics.
Can you explain to me why votes should be weighted differently at all?
The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.
It’s still here. We dress it up as voter ID or something similar.
It’s interesting how actual black people find even the idea that it’s harder for them to get IDs (or that they don’t know how to get them) racist, one example: https://youtu.be/DCytgANu010?feature=shared
Voter id is so far from this. You might have to jump through hoops to get an ID, but with literacy tests it was almost impossible for blacks to register.
The biggest thing we need to work is the subtle racism of low expectations.
Voter ID is not racist.
In Texas, there used to be DPS offices in most mid-sized towns and everyone just had to wait in line to get their driver’s license (principal ID for most Texans) or non-driver ID card.
Now, they’ve concentrated them into a few larger service centers that are often miles away from the cities they serve and require appointments, sometimes not available for several weeks… but with a few that spontaneously crop up at short notice.
Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family?
Germany, by contrast, requires every resident to register in the city or town they live in for an ID, whether they intend to vote or not, but even small towns have such an office, and as someone else pointed out, every citizen receives a letter 30 days before each election telling them exactly who/what is being voted on, where they are to go on Election Day (always a Sunday), and how to vote absentee if they’re not going to be in town that day.
Like many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc.
It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent.
Just a happy accident really?
It certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally.
Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner.
To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
It absolutely is. Go look at the racial demographics of the neighborhoods where DMVs are being opened and closed. And then ask yourself which racial groups, at large, are more likely to have time in their day to sit at an inconveniently located DMV and what party they most often vote for.
We've removed some of the structural racism, but we've also gotten much better at hiding and "justifying" it.
Additionally, think about all the votes that were passed when these tests were present. Every one of those votes meant a huge and consistent portion of the population could not participate. Which probably created a situation where that population was at a disadvantage across many systems.
Even if they stopped doing this test in 19XX, it would take a significant amount of time to unwind not only the unfair policies enacted under it but also the damage done by those policies to families. We might still be undoing the damae from them.
A similar case is redlining -- city policies that forced immigrant and minority populations to live in certain areas, limiting those family's abilities to participate in the growth of housing value. A couple generations cannot accrue value from their homes, because they've been forced to live in a low value area. Even once redlining became illegal, those families were 60 years behind in an exponential growth curve. Fixing the policy is a great start, as was removing these tests, but we need to do more to actually make things right.
The sheer unadulterated racism from the past is still very much being felt in the present, as waves and ripples from past decisions and policies led to inequal financial and social outcomes that take generations to repair (if they ever can be repaired.)
TIL voting right depends on literacy in America. Illiterate people have more rights in third world countries apparently.
No, this is incorrect. This has not been the case for 60 years now. These tests were discontinued as part of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That information is in the linked article, which is short and only takes a minute to read.
This example was also far from universal, certainly across the entire USA but even in Louisiana.
edit: reading other comments, it isn't clear whether this information is even true for a small subset of Louisiana 60+ years ago
TIL yet another way MLK changed America.
The US talks up its history of freedom, but wasn't really a fully democratic country until the moon landings.
And by that definition much of Europe isn’t fully democratic?
Voting rights in parts of America before the Voting Rights Act depended on passing an arbitrary test that differed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and may or may not have measured literacy and civics knowledge… if you were black (or native American, depending on state). You could be a well-regarded English literature professor at a black college and still have to subject yourself to what you knew was a farce being administered by someone far less literate than you in order to attempt to vote.
If you were white (“your grandfather could vote”), you were usually exempt, even if you could barely sign your name on your voter registration.