> [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.")
A clarifying bit of context: there were extensive complaints about the multiple-choice constitutional interpretation tests that were given at the time.
After its taken, and presuming active measures were taken to prevent distribution other than for people taking it who would then return it, pretty easily. Paper is biodegradable, burns easily, can be shredded (and recycled into new paper), etc.
Since the literacy test was used at the discretion of the authorities in charge of the vote they could choose who to give it to based on how likely they were to get away with using it.
I mean if you know the black people in your district will vote for a particular party you probably don't actually want to keep the black people in your district from voting, you want that party not to win because otherwise the party might help the black people living in your district.
If there are 1800 black people and 1100 white people that can vote in your district, then maybe you only need to keep 900 people from voting to be safe.
So then you announce you will be checking outstanding warrants at the polls, 600 people don't show up. You only need to keep 300 people from voting! So you start giving literacy tests to black voters but letting the white voters through - how many black people you think you will actually need to give that literacy test to before the rest of them wise up that you aren't going to be letting them vote?
I'd say maybe 20.
Now how many of them going to get copies of that test to do something about? What if you don't want to give them a copy of the test? How they going to get that copy of the test?
I'm sorry but I think this kind of thing would be pretty under-documented, just like most crime. I'm agreeing you can't keep it thoroughly hidden but hidden enough that it is difficult to say with any specificity this was the actual test used in that district on that day to fail these people.
on edit: removed something that was probably a bit rude, sorry, was going through some problems with kid at the moment and frustration transferred to my writing.
There is absolutely no need to take this tone, especially seeing as the person you are replying to is clearly in good faith.
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")?
In fact the site you link to even calls out the test mention in the article, stating that it seems it was used in one parish for one summer.
It's a trick question. It's the Vice President, who is elected by the people (a)... but not for the role of president of the senate. But it could also be the President pro tempoire, who is elected by the senate (b).
Also the first question presupposes we all go to church. What about synagogues or temples?
Question #5 is entirely discretionary depending on the context of what power you are discussing.
And that's the point: these literacy tests were filled with questions like these that let the test giver choose the right answer based on whether they wanted the test taker to pass.
I'm pretty sure the reason why, "even in the 1960s, even in Louisiana", state courts struck the tests down is that such tests categorically were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1949, not because of the particular unfairness of particular tests as viewed by the state courts in the 1960s.
No he’s not: the Vice President is elected by the Electoral College, or if they do not do so then by the Senate (see the Twelfth Amendment).
Neither is the President elected by the people: he’s also elected by the Electoral College, or if they fail to do so then by the House of Representatives, voting by state.
Australian immigration had a similar literacy/dictation test for migrants under the 'White Australia' policy up until the 1940's. If the migration officer didnt like the look of you, you'd be given a test to dictate welsh instead english, as it was a 'prescribed english language'.
There were many white Americans fighting for equality for all. Heck, look at the recent BLM movement, the woke discussions, #metoo and more.
All of these things were possible because of the 60s, because of white legislators, white judges, white supreme court judges, pushing for change, enacting change, creating the US today which, while imperfect, is quite supportive of equality, both legally and culturally.
So yes, there was all sorts of main stream media pushing for equality.
Heck, the first interracial kiss on US primetime was in the 60s on Star Trek ToS.
Maybe there was concern, when progressives were fighting this sort of thing, that if they picked the most unbelievable example, the naive public (those not familiar with the residents of a typical Klan-era backwater Louisiana parish) would question its veracity… as we see today…
Imagine you were going to forge a such a test? I don’t think I could make up something this ridiculous if I tried. I’d have to be practiced in generating trick questions, and motivated by malice to come close. Realistically, I’d give up and pick one of the readily-available real examples of poll tests to use.
> 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 Constitution of the United States places the final authority in our Nation in the hands of...
> a. the national courts.
> b. the States.
> c. the people.
The answer key says c. is correct, but I think I would have answered a. You could also argue the States is correct, since they have the authority to amend the Constitution. The very concept of "final authority" is sort of antithetical to the Constitution.
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.
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.
Voters vote for an Elector, not a President/Vice President.
An Elector could pledge a different vice presidential candidate, and might get votes.
The vast majority of voters do not actually know truly how President and Vice President are elected
Except in the case where a vacancy occurs in the Vice Presidency during a term, in which case the President does appoint a Vice President who is confirmed by the House of Representatives, so (c) would in that case be correct -- but that wasn't true until 1967.
Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time.
Speaking to many of the outraged commenters, Do you think that the example test is a reasonable analog of any state's voting process currently in use? If not, do you think an analog of this test could be enacted legally under current legal statutes? If so, what additional changes would you propose to supplement current statutes?
But other states saw what they did and managed to pass similar laws with just a tad more subtlety and plausible deniability.
Hopefully in the other unnamed states/actions that have been taken since, the impact will be small, or preferably, their actions will face similar repeal.
The protection took a major hit in 2013, when the US Supreme court made a 5-4 decision in Shelby vs. Holder [0], permitting some areas to (re-)start a strategy of imposing unconstitutional and discriminatory laws just before an election, with local authorities knowing that any court-case voiding their law can't arrive in time to matter. Then they just enact the same kind of discriminatory law before the next major election, over and over, with no real punishment.
While state legislatures aren't currently choosing to enact things quite as blatant as before, the same exploit makes it possible.
-- [0]
The act would have set pre-clearance to occur based on a pattern of recent violations [1], and also made election day a holiday, promoted early-voting etc... So you can guess which party was for it and which was doing the filibustering.
Related, the NVRA has another section about how states aren't supposed to mass-purge voters right before an election [2] (whether it's blatantly discrimiantory or not) but without pre-clearance it may lack teeth.
[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/prec...
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4
[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-virgi...
For a bit of a happier perspective and a personal american story - I descend from this area from emancipated slaves. The farm they worked on was given to them when the owner died, and they became prominent and educated members of the community and established a legacy that still exists today. I am always amazed at the adversity they must have faced when achieving success in reconstruction era - but from my research at least, the really bad systemic stuff didn't come til 40ish years after emancipation, like the "one drop" laws and stuff that was attempting to roll back the progress made during reconstruction. It's a really fascinating part of history I always try to learn more about.
I suspect the regressive cultural backlash at the US at the moment as the "next generational" response the the civil rights campaigns in the mid-late 20th century.
I think regression will be along some other axis. My personal two suspects are a) some variant of gender roles and the way they've changed since the 1960s and b) the widespread acceptance of cultural diversity being a good thing and the idea that there can not be superiority between cultures. The "goodness" of both of these things has been challenged quite a bit recently either directly or by shifting circumstances on other fronts causing people to need to think more critically about those subjects. In contrast, the goodness of not being racist (at least on a first order level) has been sailing along quite successfully recently.
All races may have potential but are absolutely not the same in opportunity and it very much is still a directly race based problem. If you want a trivial example, there's campaign messaging going on right now in the United States based on the racist idea that Haitan immigrants are killing and eating pets. If you look at the racial outcomes across the board they are much poorer for PoC in nearly every single possible thing you can reliably measure. From my view, there are still many of us that are of "shaking things up" age, I assure you, because much needs to be shaken up.
I don't believe that. I don't even think that you believe it.
Here's culture A, which believes that there cannot be superiority between cultures. And here's culture B, which believes that there can be superiority between cultures, and in fact that B is the superior one. I'm pretty sure, based on what you said here, that you think that A is the superior culture, and that B should change into A (or at a minimum, that A should not change into B).
And if you can look at, say, the culture of Denmark, and that of Afghanistan, and think that neither is superior as a culture to the other, that seems to me to be almost wilfully blind.
Cultures are fundamentally incommensurable and cannot be viewed from some abstract or neutral viewpoint. That doesn't mean to say comparison and discussion isn't informative - just not conclusive.
I think that's true. So when I say that Denmark is a better culture than Afghanistan, yes, I am making that judgment through the lens of western values. But as someone with four daughters, I simply cannot bend my mind far enough to consider Afghanistan's culture (or, perhaps, the Taliban's culture) as superior. (Though I admit that I might be able to if I were in the Taliban.)
But what I was aiming at was mostly the idea that it is morally superior to consider all cultures as having equal value. That position contradicts itself, even if the "morally superior" part is left unstated.
I will give you that all cultures have elements that are worthwhile.
Funny you mention Afghanistan. I almost did in my original comment. I think Afghanistan and the people we we spent 20yr propping up there is the wedge that will drive open the door to broader discussion domestically.
You can already see this starting to happen where people are getting more comfortable comparing the pros and cons of various subsets of American cultures. Will it turn into anything, IDK.
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...
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."
There's no Anmeldung system in America. Actually voter registration is the closest thing you have to an official current address, and it's a lot easier to do (no appointment required).
The disturbing party coming up on the Right feels like Germany has blamed itself for too long. That “self-blame” is a lot of what has enabled modern Germany to be a much better place than it was before the war.
(I’m an American living in greater Nuremberg, and get to see monuments to Germany’s failures on a regular basis)
Given how Germany is treating those protesting its support of Israel's ongoing war, some would suggest that Germany isn't being quite as brutally honest one might imagine.
This is especially true in the West. Large swaths of the German capitalist class actively backed Hitler and the Nazi party, and got away with it. How they got away with it is particularly appalling. One of the most common defenses at Nuremburg was "I was just following orders", an excuse that was usually rejected. But there was one very specific kind of order that would reliably keep Nazis (Hugo Boss, IG Farben, etc) out of the noose: shareholder duties. In the name of anticommunism, there was an active campaign in the First World[2] to downplay the war crimes of German capitalists after WWII.
The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete - and politically influenced by the exact same economic forces[3] that put Hitler in the chancellor's seat in the first place. States create liberal democracies with free markets, businesses figure out how to exploit those markets, they get unfathomably rich before someone can stop them, they coopt or overthrow democracy, and then replace liberalism with tyranny.
Overthrow is possible because society has vulnerabilities that can be exploited through propaganda and outrage porn. You socially engineer the public into abolishing their own liberty to hurt the other that they hate. In America, that vulnerability was African Americans. In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration[4].
[0] The Stazi wants to know about your dancing skill and computer memory speed
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
[2] As in, "aligned with American capitalism" world
[3] America's business elite were not that far behind Germany's in terms of planning to overthrow democracy. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[4] German immigration policy - and, to a larger extent, most EU external immigration policy - is built entirely for rich, self-motivated knowledge workers who can navigate bureaucracy and do all the integration work themselves. As a result, it has lots of poorly integrated immigrant populations with lots of scary right-wingers that the German right can use to scare German liberals into, themselves, becoming scary right-wingers. Fnord fnord fnord.
In general as a reply, I'm not sure where you grew up in Germany (or if, because of Stazi). I grew up in West Germany in the 1970 and 1980 and there was not one week where there wasn't a story about German war crimes, genocide etc. in one of the large magazines. It was also a large topic in school. But it seems where you grew up things were different.
"In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration"
No it's the same. Racism together with the special case of antisemitism. People don't change.
"The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete"
Interesting view point. I would assume it is wrong (though I do think denazification in the East was incomplete), it doesn't have anything to do with being tired of remembering or incomplete denazification. Its just that people don't change, and they are nationalists, socialists and racists (just like the Nazi party - (National Socialists)) and with the rise of the populist right in the US and all over Europe, they thought they should band together again. The internet removed all gate keepers. Before that all other far-right parties in the West like "Die Republikaner" didn't get lots of traction but faded away fast.
Yes, they are well aware of what happened in 1930s and that there was Hitler, etc.
And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times. It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around. But not anyone's grandfather was involved. And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper.
Who is they? The people who brought far right leaders to court because those were shouting SA slogans? Surely not those. And I would argue, that the new right indeed does see the connection, they want to have that connection to today times (see shouting SA slogans).
"It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around."
Not sure what that sentence means.
"But not anyone's grandfather was involved."
You seem to have missed the 1960/70s where the topic exactly was that "The fathers did this and didn't talk about it" (In the West, East Germany just declared themselves victims of the Nazis) - which directly lead into the red terror (Red Army Faction RAF) of the 1970s as a reaction to "old nazis".
And you seem to have missed the large Wehrmacht discussion in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition (late, I know)
"And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper."
Many companies have paid [0] (late, not enough IMHO) for using slave labor - at least that discussion led to every company pay a historian to write down that part of their history most ignored before. The biggest problem is not the companies but some rich people in Germany like the Quandts who are one of the richest families in Germany and own a large chunk of BMW - they got their money by slave labor, selling to the Prussian army and the Wehrmacht and by stealing from jews.
Compared to that, my (German) grandparents lost their large farms (not complaining, or accusing, but as a comparison) and everything else except their clothing and the clothing they could carry in two suitcases. They were not on the right side of "War Is a Racket".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Remembrance,_Respon...
I know that sounds neat to say, but it has no connection to reality. Neither of those guys influenced the late German Empire or the Nazis (a few Nazi ideologues might have read Nietzsche, but they never understood him; meanwhile they absolutely rejected Hegel, and attacked people with accusations of Hegelianism).
Was it just an expressed opinion of "Germany was most of the time undemocratic, unfair and discriminating"? Yes, it wasn't democratic in the Kaiserreich from 1871 until 1918, it had huge democracy deficits in the Weimar republic from 1918 to 1933, it was a murderous, facist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, and a Russian puppet state with fake elections from 1945 to 1989 in the East. So I would agree with that expressed opinion.
In case that was sarcasm, then I have to disagree. The current German state has an excellent track record when it comes to voter enfranchisement. Its shortcomings with the democratic process lay elsewhere. The last really questionable action relating to elections was the questionable ban of the communist party - in 1956.
"Current state" is a convenient wording to exclude 1933-1990
Personally don't think the German Democratic Republic had an excellent track with enfranchisement.
> I was preparing for my last major standardized test, the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry... I wondered why I was the only Black student in the room...
> The teacher boasted the course would boost our GRE scores by two hundred points, which I didn’t pay much attention to at first— it seemed an unlikely advertising pitch. But with each class, the technique behind the teacher’s confidence became clearer. She wasn’t making us smarter so we’d ace the test—she was teaching us how to take the test....
> It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests— the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores— two hundred points, as promised— than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual strength but did not have the resources or, in some cases, even the awareness to acquire better form through high-priced prep courses. Because of the way the human mind works— the so-called “attribution effect,” which drives us to take personal credit for any success— those of us who prepped for the test would score higher and then walk into better opportunities thinking it was all about us: that we were better and smarter than the rest and we even had inarguable, quantifiable proof.... And because we’re talking about featureless, objective numbers, no one would ever think that racism could have played a role.
> Excerpt From How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi
Of course, there are historical reasons for why the average black family is not as wealthy as an average white one, but the testing is not it - i.e. a poor white family is just as disadvantaged as a poor black family, according to the test - and Kendi was not so disadvantaged, by his own account.
From what I have been able to understand of writers like Kendi (see also e.g. Robin diAngelo), this statistical fact is itself, inherently, considered to be an example of "racism" (hence terms like "systemic" or "institutional" racism); and the ensuing (supposed) bias of the test towards the wealthy, another one (simply because it is ensuing).
I struggle to imagine why you would believe this to be the case. (I say this as someone who wrote, and did quite well in, several high school math competitions without making any particular effort to prepare for them.)
>giving us an unfair advantage that we false attribute to intelligence.
I struggle to imagine why this would be considered unfair, or not an actual sign of intelligence (assuming that the training worked).
I will refrain from providing the bulk of my rebuttal to Kendi, except to note:
> And because we’re talking about featureless, objective numbers, no one would ever think that racism could have played a role.
... Yes, that is exactly why racism could not possibly have played a role. The kind of "disparate impact" that Kendi seems to be alluding to here, is simply not compatible with the lay understanding of the concept of "racism", but only with a specialized academic one; but the potential for moral outrage attaches to the lay definition. The conflation that Kendi attempts is a classic example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy .
Quite frankly, I doubt they even bothered with even that token effort to find excuses for failing people. They didn't need them. Everyone knew the game; if you were black under Jim Crow, you pretty much failed the moment they forced you to take it, regardless of your answers.
Literacy tests were only meant to give the threadbare illusion of objectivity to their disenfranchisement efforts and make that effort more efficient in the process. It's unlikely any state or county ever bothered to assemble a common "official" literacy test, or that officials ever put much effort into crafting a perfectly ambiguous question no one could every answer correctly. There was no need, and to the extent any did, it would likely have been just to make taking the tests as painful and humiliating as possible to punish the test-taker for not accepting that the fix was in, and to further discourage anyone else from bothering them.
Truthfully, the humiliating aspects of the various disenfranchisement mechanisms were almost certainly quite intentional. Fury over the perceived humiliation of the loss of the Civil War, and the changes wrought by Reconstruction, was the constant underlying theme of Redeemer[1] messaging. Simply regaining political power wasn't enough to slake that anger.
Ambiguous: 1 10 11 20 21 22 26 27 Ambiguous execution (e.g. "draw a line around"): 4 5 7 8 9 12 14 Easy on the face of it: 2 3 13 15 16 17 18 25 Nonsense: 6 23 24 28 29 30 Difficult to execute (e.g. "draw this complicated set of shapes in a small space while under time pressure without making any mistake"): 19
That's just my quick assessment and might vary for you but I probably took more than 10 minutes just to think about this. At best (and I was generous) 7 out of 30 questions are clear.
And that is assuming the questions have been formulated in good faith, which is evidently not the case. Question 2 could mean just as well instruct you to draw a line under the whole expression "the last word" in that line, or a line under "the last word in this line", or just under "line". Who's to say?
"draw a line under the last word in this line"
____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.
If it was this, there would be quotes around "word".
> No, wait, you needed to underline every occurrence of the word "line".
If it was this, it wouldn't say "last".
This particular one is not ambiguous.
Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.
As the judge of this test, I interpret your answer as incorrect. I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined. Test failed, no cheating required.
(Note that had you underlined the phrase, "the last word in this line", I would have still judged it incorrect, claiming that "word" or "line" should be underlined. Again, this requires no cheating.)
This makes you a cheating administrator in this hypothetical,
>I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined.
... because this expectation is not valid.
Quotation marks are not merely needed to make the question "unambiguous"; they are needed to make your interpretation possible.
Actually, it doesn't.
> this expectation is not valid.
Actually, it is.
> Quotation marks are not merely needed to make the question "unambiguous"; they are needed to make your interpretation possible.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is indeed ambiguous, with my interpretation indeed being valid.
The fact that we came up with 2 different, equally valid interpretations, just goes to show that the question is ambiguous.
Some other equally valid interpretations are explained by another poster here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912790
The quotes are needed to change this sentence from its clear meaning to these other ones.
If there were quotes around those 6 words, it would make the question unambiguous, sure. But without the quotes, my interpretation and judgement is still valid.
> The quotes are needed to change this sentence from its clear meaning to these other ones.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is ambiguous. Just as you claim your interpretation is the "clear meaning", others have exactly as valid a claim to their interpretation being the "clear meaning".
And who would you argue this to? The guy giving you the test who has the freedom to fail you for any reason they want?
There's no appeals court. These tests were not tests.
Oh wait, it could also refer to "the last 'word' in this line", so you would need to underline "word".
(That’s actually in the article’s own headline.)
A Near Impossible 1964 Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote
Too many "rational" people who think that these were just clever word games and that "they seem fair," when being unfair was the entire point. As if the law, and the test givers were going to treat the people taking these tests fairly. I guess it's nice to have so many people who seem to think that the system would treat these people rationally and fairly. But that wasn't how it was. (Also, if you do think that, I highly recommend you go read some history books.)
I imagine that one can always create a language typical to some group and impossible to overcome by people outside of this group. I'm trying to learn music as a person who has never attended music school, and even though there is a lot of terminology in English available in the internet, the terminology in my country is different, uses different symbols and are inaccessible for me. My kids learn them, when I see it I cannot make anything of it, because of different coding of the same ideas (like intervals, minor major etc.) in the system that is imposed in my country
Yes, the typeface. And the numbered list looks suspicious too, now that you mention it. Also the kerning (look at the renderings of fi and fr in the document).
It wouldn't be the first time something like that gave away a forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy.
I've seen documents from the 60s and earlier, and they never look like someone banged them out in MS Word with Times New Roman.
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.
Without quotation marks, this task is inherently ambiguous.
> 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.
The way something like this was administered, was that tests returned by white people were given a cursory glance and accepted, and tests returned by black people were just rejected and given some random explanation as to why they were wrong, and then the test was chucked in the garbage. Nobody cared what the right answer was, all that mattered was there was some fig leaf explanation for why black voters couldn't vote. Mostly black voters stopped bothering to try after a couple of go arounds here -- not to mention the physical intimidation that went along with it. The point was to inculcate learned helplessness.
This wasn't the SAT, y'all.
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.
> 26. In the third square below, write the second letter of the fourth word.
Bzzzt. Answer was "h", it's the second letter of "the fourth word".
> 18. Look at the line of numbers below, and place on the blank, the number that should come next. 3 6 9 \_ 15
We said the number that should come _next_. You were meant to write 18.
> 9. Draw a line through the two letters below that come last in the alphabet.
We said to draw _a_ line. You drew two lines.
> 7. Above the letter X make a small cross.
We said above, yours is within the X.
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.
#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
The other trick is that the line could be too short depending on your handwriting, in theory disqualifying the tested person regardless of what they write down.
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.
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.)
In the naivest, most shallow analysis Voter ID is not racist because black Americans are just as capable of receiving ID. The logic is fine, but purposefully ignorant.
The barrier to ID IS NOT just "do you have the physical/mental ability to get ID". The barriers are economic and geographic. When you don't put DMVs in black areas that becomes a barrier. When IDs cost money that becomes a barrier. When a motor vehicle is required that becomes a barrier.
The subtle racism is ignoring poor rural whites that face the same “challenges” of distance (even more so!) but are somehow ignored.
The subtle racism is making the claim over and over again without actually presenting any data.
Here's something I wrote on the voter ID topic before [4] (disregard the citation numbers in the quote):
> A question that isn't for you in particular to answer is, in the current day and age, would the number of fraudulent ballots prevented by a new strict voter ID requirement be greater than the number of valid votes prevented by such a requirement? The current legal framework of obtaining government-issued IDs makes strict voter ID laws de facto voter suppression. 30 million people lacked a driver's license as of 2022 [2], and I'd be willing to bet that at least 1 million of them are US citizens of voting age. Let's assume that 25% of them would vote if they had the option to do so from their homes (a arbitrary but conservative hypothetical percentage in light of actual voter turnout percentages [5]). There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots. Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
[1] https://www.mapresearch.org/id-documents-report
[2] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-low-income-communit...
[3] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/ID-info-Black-communities.p...
That's a strawman. I don't think anyone is promoting that a drivers license, and only a drivers license is the sole form of appropriate voter ID.
> There's been no national election with 250000 fraudulent ballots.
In 2020 "In Arizona, Biden won by 10,457 votes, and in Georgia, he won by 12,670 votes"
Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
Seems like even a small amount of voter fraud could have an effect?
Even so [1]:
> More than one in ten (11%) U.S. adult citizens—or nearly 26 million people— lack any form of government-issued photo identification.
There are also people without birth certificates. Obtaining some IDs can be difficult without having other IDs. For example, depending on where you live, getting a driver's license is difficult without a birth certificate. (Ctrl-F for "Lack of birth certificate" on [2], though apparently South Carolina lets you get a voter registration card before you get a valid voter ID.)
The larger issue is that valid forms of ID for voting differ between states, and (beyond the topic of voting) the difficulty of getting what most people think of as common IDs differs between states. There might well be 100 thousand citizens across the US who would fall through the cracks if every state that didn't already require voter ID were to pass laws naively requiring voter ID for the 2028 election. Voting is a right for citizens, so state governments should go out of their way to make obtaining stable IDs convenient for citizens who lack them (accounting for, among other things, transportation difficulties and time spent on in-person verification that takes away from job time). If the federal government has no authority to unify ID requirements, then states should cooperate to standardize their requirements toward convenience. I would also like if every state (and I do mean every state) allowed payment statements and utility bills as valid identification for voting, because getting stable IDs such as driver's licenses or passports takes months.
> Arizona has 4,109,270 registered voters, so the margin was 0.2%, or 2 votes out of every thousand registered voters. Georgia has 7,004,034 registered voters so the margin was 1.8 out of every thousand registered voters as well.
> That seems like a very small margin of votes is deciding elections.
If the margin were something like 100 votes in a state, I wouldn't know what to do about it, but I would still be dissatisfied if a new voter ID requirement in the state blocked 10000 citizens from voting. When I wrote this before:
> Any new voter ID bill that doesn't take this into account will almost certainly be voter suppression. The problem isn't the principle of requiring a voter ID. It's that the laws around getting an ID need to change prior to or simultaneously with laws that make ID a requirement for voting.
What I meant to communicate was that any states passing new voter ID laws should near-simultaneously pass laws that making getting government-issued, voting-eligible IDs easier, especially for people who lack multiple forms of ID. And for sure, states should not be carelessly closing DMVs the way Alabama did in 2015 [3].
[1] https://www.mapresearch.org/file/MAP-Identity-Documents-repo...
[2] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id#toggle...
[3] https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/10/01/alabama-drivers-licen...
That seems like a reasonable idea and one that many voter ID proponents support.
> the way Alabama did in 2015
Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.
That was just Secretary of State John Merrill's claim, and I'm saying that it was a careless one. "There are still places to get voter ID, just 31 fewer places out of about 100" is not the same as "anyone who wants an ID can still get one". The burden of proof was on the Merrill to demonstrate that the Board of Registrar's offices and the mobile ID van (which in 2014 officially appeared 2 out of 25 times on weekends and 23 out of 25 times on weekdays usually during 9-5 hours [1][2]) would compensate for the lack of possibly closer-by DMVs.
Consider the context of the voter ID laws themselves [3]:
> Under the new law, which only went into effect in 2014, only a handful of forms of ID, including driver’s licenses, meet the requirements.
> Civil rights groups vehemently opposed the legislation, noting that these IDs are harder to obtain for minorities, who among other things are more reliant on public transportation. A state analysis showed that 500,000 registered voters lacked a driver’s licenses around the time the law was being put into effect.
What ended up happening after the 31 DMVs were closed was [4]:
> However, since the photo ID voting law went into effect in 2014, only a small portion of the estimated 250,000 Alabamans who do not already have the accepted IDs have obtained the free version. In 2014, an election year, only 5,294 of those IDs were issued, state officials told TPM.
> The number of IDs issued this year is even smaller. As of September 28, 1,442 IDs had been issued since January 2, 2015.
...
> However, as of last Monday, only 29 IDs were issued from the mobile units this year and four from the state capitol, according to the secretary of state’s office.
...
> Civil rights activists point to several reasons for why, they say, the free ID program has been ineffective. For one, many of the black residents affected by the DMV closures live miles from the county offices that issue IDs and African-Americans are more likely to be dependent on public transport.
And then consider what Merrill said about the DMV closures [3]:
> The way Merrill sees it, the closures will cause “a real inconvenience” for those seeking driver’s license, but have no bearing on Alabamans’ ability to vote, since the 67 boards of registrars remain open.
...
> The [state] ID is one of them,” Merrill said. “I don’t know why people don’t have driver’s licenses, except that they don’t drive. Maybe some of them can’t drive, but I don’t know.”
In the best light, Merrill didn't understand the burden of needing to rely on public transportation to travel possibly farther than you would have needed to if the DMV that used to be available stopped being available.
Tangentially, I feel as if Merrill, along with other Alabama officials, was being gaslit [5]:
> Collier reported that Mason proposed closing multiple driver's license offices throughout the State and asked ALEA to put together a plan. It was Collier's understanding that Mason intended the plan to be rolled out in a way that had limited impact on Governor Bentley's political allies. Collier claims he reported this to the Attorney General' s office because he was concerned about a Voting Rights Act violation.
...
> Ultimately, the decision to close the offices was reversed, in part, after the state litigated the issue with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which had claimed that the closures had a disproportionate impact on minority communities.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141102180855/http://www.alabam...
[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2014
[3] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-voter-id-dmv
[4] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/alabama-free-voter-id...
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20170408201133/http://bentleyinv...
Almost all of Europe has effective voter ID laws or at least processes by which eligibility to vote is verified.
People love to call out how the US needs to adopt processes from Europe because it’s done in a better way. Voter ID sounds like a great place to start.
What you're not realizing is the intention of these laws is to be racist and cause disenfranchisement. Therefore, that being the result is not a "failure" - that's what the laws were intended to do.
> Voter ID sounds like a great place to start
I don't understand why. Why are people so caught up on Voter ID that they're willing to push it even if the risk of disenfranchising people is there?
I think I can guess the reason why, but I don't want to be presumptuous.
We really don't have any problems with widespread election fraud due to identity theft. It's just not even a real problem. We don't have any evidence to support that. So, I don't know what these laws are intending to accomplish. Well, I do know, but for the hypothetical person who is not focused on disenfranchising people - what are they hoping to accomplish with this law? Do you know?
I never said such a thing, and I even ended my second to previous reply saying the opposite. It's completely possible to require voter ID "correctly", but my impression is that lawmakers would rather do it quickly, by passing voter ID laws without even thinking about the millions of citizens who lack ID.
I dug into the Alabama example to support my claim that Alabama carelessly closed 31 DMVs in 2015 (and to suggest that you shouldn't take then Secretary of State Merrill's arguments at face value).
The funny part is that you’re taking the opposite sides arguments at face value.
“Oh, some random person claimed closing the DMVs makes it harder to get ID, so it must be true”
We haven’t even established that voters don’t have IDs in the first place.
You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US. Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
I have no proof, only evidence. How about this? [1]
> Alabama's chief election official, Secretary of State Jim Bennett, said Monday that registrars' offices in every county will be offering the free IDs, starting this week. The offices are open during regular courthouse hours, he said.
...
> The secretary of state's office reports that a check of voting records with the state Department of Public Safety shows 20 percent of Alabama's registered voters, or about 500,000 adults, lack a driver's license or non-driver ID issued by the Department of Public Safety. Bennett estimated half of that group has one of the other acceptable forms of photo IDs.
The byline is "By The Associated Press". There is no link for the 500,000 claim. (Should I consider the possibility that the Associated Press got the numbers wrong on accident? made up the numbers on purpose? or that Bennett himself replied to a response for comment?)
> You can’t rent a home or get electricity without ID in the US.
Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
> Yet the claim is that swaths of minorities somehow have made it to adulthood without ever having an ID?
The claim is that swaths of people in Alabama lacked ID in 2014 and 2015, and that minorities were overrepresented in that group. Even if you don't believe the second part, what would convince you about the first part? At the very least I find it believable that Alabama had at least a few thousands of people who lost their IDs (due to situations including but not limited to homelessness [2]) or didn't renew their IDs in time. In regards to registered voters who got an ID valid for the 2014 voter ID law by 2015, I don't know how such people would manage to live, but based on the articles I found during this conversation I am inclined to believe that there are such people.
[1] https://www.al.com/wire/2014/03/new_photo_voter_ids_to_be_av...
> Could you post a link with evidence suggesting that? Maybe temporary documents (which convince landowners of identity but might be insufficient for official government ID checks) or affidavits let people barely rent an apartment.
You can't get a hotel room or rent an apartment, you can't open a bank account, you can't get a job, you can't get on a flight or a train, and probably most of all - you can't apply for government assistance without a form of ID.
It's factual that black Americans are more likely to not have ID, and therefore a law requiring photo ID would disproportionately affect them. That's not up for debate.
In addition, Voting ID laws have historically been a method of disenfranchisement. I certainly don't trust conservatives to not disenfranchise voters, particularly when the method they're proposing was originally designed specially to exclude black Americans from voting.
In the naivest, most shallow view, voting ID doesn't seem bad. But when you look at WHO is proposing it, the history of voting ID, the distribution of ID in the US, etc. (the broader context), it seems clear that the intention of those types of laws is not pure.
In addition to this, we have virtually zero evidence that voter fraud is a widespread problem. The topic of voter fraud is largely just "made up" following the insurrection on Jan 6th. To me, it seems suspicious that we're proposing and pushing laws to restrict voting when we haven't even been able to verify the problem exists in the first place.
It doesn’t have to be widespread to have an effect on outcomes.
I would have hoped a more logical place like HN would understand taking extremely risky measures, which have a history of disenfranchising people, isn't worth it when the problem they're attempting to solve cannot even be identified.
The reason people are so hesitant to implement Voter ID is that the people advocating Voter ID aren't very honest. They refuse to admit the racist history, they refuse to admit the disparities between demographics, and they refuse to acknowledge their own lack of evidence.
That's very concerning. It makes one wonder what their intentions are. If they are truly not attempting to disenfranchise people, then why not admit to the previous history and then explain how that will be avoided? That would ease everyone's concerns. A win-win. But they don't do it.
Do you not find that suspicious?
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.
They're still there, most mid-sized towns still have them.
>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.
Yes they opened the big licensing centers and made them appointment only which is an improvement, you waste zero time. "Miles away" means nothing in Texas, the state is bigger than France.
>Guess what does not work for people reliant on the meager public transportation infrastructure
There is no public transportation infrastructure in most mid-sized Texas towns.
>or getting rides from also time-strapped friends and family?
Now with appointments you can plan ahead with family or friends that are time strapped.
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."
See also: Gerrymandering. Same concept.
I’ve worked in the ID space and know how the parts work together. When I found myself widowed and having to get a passport for my son, the process of getting a replacement social security card for him was incredibly onerous. 3 different visits! Mind you this was to get a replacement cardboard card - getting survivors benefits is a simple phone call.
Multiple visits is a barrier for folks without paid time off. Physical documents is a barrier for folks without unstable housing or noncustodial parents.
It’s interesting that all of this bullshit is required to exercise your right to vote. But we have the minimal possible controls on the right to bear arms in those states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Voter_Registration_...
The aforementioned problem persists, different organizations with different scopes.
One disproportionately effects black voters with a (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impa...) ~10% effectiveness
Just because one is working better then the other doesn't mean they are any different in their purpose
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.
Most notably, pilot examinations for aviation and maritime certifications.
I think they use these types of questions to exclude rule memorisation and test the ability to reason about the intention or relevant effects of rules and principles of the art involved.
It seems like the intention is also to penalise the inability to reason about ambiguous situations, ensure that the subject can effectively divide attention (if you spend too much time focusing on these ambiguous situations trying to find a nonexistent perfect answer you will fail the test), and to filter out low cognitive ability in general.
I’m not a test design expert, however, so ymmv.
"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.
> 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’d be interested to know which ones you saw as ambiguous?
FWIW the test is obviously mostly about tricking the test taker, and not that much about literacy. Along with one question that seems possibly designed to filter out people with a non-Christian interpretation of the cross as a geometric figure.
Could be answered with:
right
right from the left to the right
right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here
That one is tricky but not actually ambiguous.
For instance, "We need to make sure you agree to the conditions. Write I agree on the line below." is pretty unambiguous in its intention if you assume the writer is communicating in good faith, even if it could be quoted to make it clearer.
In the case of the original test, the lack of good faith is the entire point, which is why the sentence is considered ambiguous in this case. In a different context where you could assume good faith, you would be correct.
Any other interpretation fails to produce a consistent, sensible rule; therefore the only logical conclusion is to assume the single word case. The single word interpretation is clearly the less wrong answer.
Many tests accepted as being legitimate and foundational to regulating aviation, marine navigation, and other important occupations include questions that have no “right” answer, only a less wrong one. This is intentional and useful to judge certain aspects of understanding and judgment in those safety critical industries.
I don’t think this type of question is relevant to a “literacy” test, though.
I agree that the test is clearly given in bad faith, and is largely not a literacy test but rather a series of trick questions that require much more than literacy to analyse - but I reject the premise that this question in particular has no correct answer.
The question is in effect a multiple choice question with a few specific granular possible answers, with one being clearly less wrong than the others by process of elimination referencing the epistemological content contained in the question, with the operative assumption being that there is a correct answer.
The question would be more at home in a test to probe advanced reasoning or logic skills, perhaps even philosophy, but still it has exactly one arguably correct answer and therefore fails the bar for being irreducible in its ambiguity.
If you can provide a convincing argument based on a logical premise that supports an alternative answer other than the single word interpretation, I will be forced to reconsider my opinion. Until then, I maintain that this question has a correct answer.
The fact that the test is administered in bad faith and the answers may be judged in bad faith is immaterial; the test Could be perfect and still be judged in bad faith, so there is no argument about the technical validity of the test material anchored to the good faith of the examiner.
It can only be said that the process of the test and judgement is ambiguous, not the test itself, if the test itself is solvable.
It can also be said that the test was not designed to serve its stated purpose, or was poorly designed for its purpose, and that it was not meant to be given in good faith, but none of these statements has bearing on the solvability of the test questions.
That being said, I would expect to fail this test.
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".
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.
Most people would say "The number _preceding_ this sentence". "of this" sounds like it's part of the sentence.
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.
My problem with the whole discussion here is that I actually fail to come up with an ambiguous answer to this question that I subjectively find reasonable. Can you positivity contribute by providing an alternative interpretation that you personally would find more plausible? Otherwise complains about subjectively are hollow. Everything is subjective but it only matters in cases people actually disagree.
> ...attempts to fully remove ambiguity are often harmful.
Really? I'd like to see some real-life examples that are not just further examples of bad question-writing. Regardless, this is beside the point here, where there is a seemingly insurmountably high bar for making the case that removing ambiguity would make the situation worse (to be clear, the problem with tests like this is not just that an examiner might screw you, but that they are intended to be used that way.)
I don't claim this test is useful, but as a matter of fact the first question is not hard.
But then you can't believe it has two answers. If you don't understand the question you can't make any claims about it except maybe that you believe it is incoherent. As alexey-salmin says, the only reasonable interpretation is to circle the 1. to left of the question.
To claim that has 2 answers is similar to claiming a "Find x" style question has two answers (solving an equation vs. circling x). No, the question only has one reasonable interpretation. If the examiner is being unreasonable it is not a problem with the question and not something that can be deduced by examining the question.
It's "Paris in the the spring", with two the's!
I don't think anyone with that necessary education would pass the test.
>>> The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government.
We can debate how electors are chosen, but if the elected choose their own electors, then it's not a republic.
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.
It's obviously not the optimal system to ensure that the best possible decisions are taken, it's not designed for that.
It's more about allowing everyone to have a say in their destiny, to decide together what "best" means, even if it's somewhat objectively wrong.
Of course, you need significant balancing mechanisms to ensure that bad decisions are not too common. So you don't let the people micromanage everything and you build the system such that different parts of it keep each other in check. Sometimes it goes too far and the population has very limited choice over what's going on, sometimes it doesn't go far enough and the system is incompetent and chaotic. Often it's both, it's a hard problem.
But there's obviously better human organizational systems to take the right decisions towards a given goal or metric. That's why companies are not democratic, they are better at optimizing wealth creation (or whatever other metric), but we keep them sandboxed within the big-picture, keeping monopolies to a minimum (particularly the monopoly on violence, the core leverage of any government) so that they have a somewhat limited influence on people's lives. The military is not democratic either, neither is the justice system, nor many other performance-critical systems, they are more optimized to take better decisions at the expense of giving a choice to everyone they impact.
You can get 0 answers wrong and there would still be a way of throwing away your vote. Take question 11 - cross out the number necessary when making the number below 1 million. Do you cross out the excess 000s or do you cross out 1,000,000. Or do you cross out enough numbers to make the number below 1 million? The answer is it doesn't matter because (a) by giving you a multiple viable chance they've already managed to disenfranchise a percentage of the people they're targetting, and (b) whatever you do they can just claim the opposite interpretation and refuse you a right to vote.
There wasn't some high minded idealism behind this test. It was a tool for the people administering the election to select who they wanted to allow to vote. Any test you design will serve the same purpose, albeit some more efficiently than others.
People with poor reading and logic and legal skills are still people, living in society, paying taxes, with lives just as complicated and interesting as mine. Who am I to say that they shouldn’t have a say in how things are run?
Nobody deserves to suffer or be ignored for the horrid crime of being born stupid or "mentally deficient" by your standards.
Were you responding to the parent comment?
And in this it works remarkably well.
For example, Consuls (president-like) were voted-in indirectly through a popular assembly (kinda like the Electoral College). They elected two Consuls that had to rule jointly and keep each other in check. Their term was only 1 year and they could not run for election again for the next 10 years. Consuls rarely had the chance to do any significant damage to the system or build-up power.
The Senators served for life and acted as a counterbalance. They were also elected rather indirectly by other popular assemblies, but they came mostly from the aristocracy that maintained a consistent tradition of Roman culture and morals, for better or worse. The thing is that there were enough of them (300, later 600) that internal competition always kept them in check and prevented anyone from getting too much power.
An interesting system.
But please do not take this as me advocating for such a system. The Romans were terrible violent oppressors by modern standards. A system of government lasting for a long time is not necessarily a good feature, it just means that it's good at keeping its power, nothing else. A status quo that cannot be easily changed is great if you are lucky and the status quo turns out to be good, but it's horrible if the situation is bad and there is no easy way to fix it.
I just wanted to give a bit of context.
It doesn't matter how rational it seems. Government - particularly the racist oligarchy that is the US government - cannot be trusted to act with rational benevolence.
Imagine as well that only the elite or nobility has access to education, reading / writing, etc. It would bring society back to the pre-Enlightenment era, or whenever it was that education / reading / writing / math / etc became available to anyone.
If education played some role you would probably might have seen an alternative party/form of government emerging over time as people became more educated.
Ranked choice voting for example means that Republicans in mostly Democrat states like california could be better represented than they currently are, by voting for a "more conservative" candidate who will still get democrat votes.
The republican party is explicitly against ranked choice voting despite this.
But there are plenty of alternative parties / forms of government, it's just that in the existing political systems - especially in the US - it is reduced to a two-party system. First-past-the-post voting naturally leads to a two party system.
Basically, the US is doomed to stay in a two party system unless one of them decides to change the constitution or whatever dictates this system, or there's a successful revolution. (I don't think Jan 6th would be a successful revolution even if they, for example, killed all the senators).
wasn't it basically the original Greek democracy?
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/02/viral-imag...
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
Spousal rape started to be criminalized in the 1970s, but it took until 1993 for it to be criminalized in every state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_in_the_United_Sta...). Oklahoma and South Carolina were the two holdouts. It's still treated differently under the law in many states.
The Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in 2003. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas)
Same sex couples couldn't marry in every state until 2015. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges) Some counties in the usual states ignored the ruling for years.
There are still some significant gaps in federal protection. Gender identity and sexual orientation are protected in the workplace and for housing, but not elsewhere.
If you were white (“your grandfather could vote”), you were usually exempt, even if you could barely sign your name on your voter registration.
One obvious use case for not disenfranchising citizens convicted of crimes, is a politician who criminalizes opposition, thus making it impossible to vote them out.
As for policies which hurt people: policies favoring old folks often hurt the majority of people, but there isn't a big push to disenfranchise old people.
Sorry, technically those soldiers are killers and not murderers since when they take innocent lives it's endorsed by the state.
But if you think the presence of felons within society presents a social or public safety issue, consider that the real problem is that the justice system in the US is punitive and exploitative rather than rehabilitative, and what cultural and systemic issues might lead people to crime and violence in the first place, and to recidivism.
In terms of practicality, your taxes this year? Your lifetime taxes? College students? No vote. What happens if I paid a million in taxes last year because I sold my company but nothing this year because I took a year out? Do state taxes count? What about state contracts, do we discount Elon Musks' vote because he receives so many state contracts for his companies like SpaceX? Or do we worry that Elon Musk gets tonnes of political power which he then uses to pressure the government into.. awarded him more SpaceX contracts? Those paying the most taxes are by definition those who have benefitted most from a well run country, surely they be penalized not given more power?
To your second point; lifetime seems fair to me. Should college kids’ votes count as much as someone’s with more life experience? It doesn’t seem intuitive to me.
I get the plain “all humans are created equal” argument from an ethical perspective, but I don’t think this goes quite that deep. I would see this more as a tuning parameter for the efficiency of this system in the same way that criminal sentencing or any concensus based model we have where certain people have more “say” in it.
In a Christian sense, which you might find jarring, I’d regard the “all humans are equal” part a rule made by God, and “some humans should be given more decision power” a rule made by us that in no way contradicts God’s ultimate will.
They know what’s going on, and you can tell by their credit score.
Off the top of my head: decades long precedence on regulatory agencies' authority, abortion rights, and Presidential immunity have all undergone dramatic reshaping in the last few years in large part driven by only one ultrawealthy person (Leonard Leo, born to wealth).
Your question is silly.
Obviously democratic voting should be as equal as possible. In fact, with today's technology we should be striving for "direct democracy" more than ever.
* Unemployed uncle, I just got laid off from my FAANG company because the board needs to boost profits. Can you help me understand our welfare system so I can get on medicaid and unemployment?
* Homeless guy on the street, thanks for doing all that Occupy Wall Street stuff back in '11. What did you learn about organizing the fringes of society to try to change an unjust system? Any tricks I could apply to disenfranchised voters?
* Homeless guy on the street, I just found a giant sack of bagels in the dumpster. Are they good to eat or should I let them rot? By the way do you want some?
* January 17, 2038: Unemployed uncle, nobody can program anymore because we all just use AIs, however apparently talking into my tablet won't solve this Unix timestamp bullshit. What do you recommend?
Point is, sure, not all opinions of are equal value, but laying out judgements on others' opinions based on over-simplified mainstream prejudices narrows your ability to get good advice. That's partially what the article is about: blocking non-mainstream voters from making their voices heard.
Spoiler: the weight your vote is already determined by your worth, billionaires can lobby governments, average people can't.