> [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
https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...
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.")
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.
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")?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.
What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
That being said, I would expect to fail this test.
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.
Regardless of which you chose, if the examiner wished to disqualify you, they could simply say it's the opposite.
I don't claim this test is useful, but as a matter of fact the first question is not hard.
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.
It's "Paris in the the spring", with two the's!
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.
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.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-aust...
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 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...
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.
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.
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'"?
> "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)
> "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'!"
White people were "grandfathered" in, literally.
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.
You're kind of describing the civil rights movement.
> 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.
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.
#18 is wrong, after the 15 comes 18, so 18 should be written in the blank space.
Bastards.
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.
'the' comes twice
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.)
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
If you were white (“your grandfather could vote”), you were usually exempt, even if you could barely sign your name on your voter registration.