The Red Cross Bloodmobile has an elegant procedure for dealing with people who shouldn’t donate blood, but who don’t want to have to admit that to their friends or employers.
You go in with everyone else, and fill out the forms, and if there is something that would disqualify you as a donor, they put a specially coded sticker on your bag, and someone else discards it later.
It eliminates the danger of embarrassment or discrimination beforehand, and it mitigates the danger of a tainted donation entering the blood supply. It’s a great system.
I’m wondering if maybe we shouldn’t have something like that for voting.
We all know that ‘poll tests’ are illegal, because of the way that they were used in some locations to prevent certain classes of people from voting. In particular, not everyone was required to take a test. Also, not everyone who had to take a test would get the same test!
Giving election officials this kind of discretion made it possible to use the tests in a discriminatory way. But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe we could handle poll tests the way the Red Cross handles blood donations. That is, everyone who is eligible would be free to vote, but as part of the ballot, there would be a set of questions, randomly selected from the exam given to people who are applying for US citizenship. Ballots would be sealed, so there would be no way for election officials to know ahead of time who is being asked which questions.
When counting ballots, a failing score on the exam portion would cause a ballot to be placed in a discard pile. This would eliminate the danger of embarrassment or discrimination beforehand, and mitigate the danger of an uninformed vote entering the vote supply.
Basically, by failing the test, some voters will have indicated that they have the political equivalent of HIV. But they could still walk away from the polls proud to have ‘done their civic duty’ by voting. They could wear an ‘I voted!’ sticker, and feel great.
If the idea is for citizens to be able to vote, what’s the problem with making a voter demonstrate, as a condition of having his vote counted, that he knows as much about his own country as naturalized citizens are required to?
Note that we could use this to eliminate the age requirement for voting as well. If you’re old enough to understand and pass a citizenship test, why shouldn’t you be able to vote? And if you can’t pass such a test, regardless of your age, why should you be able to vote?
Note that this would make money much less of a factor in elections — since the people who are willing to do the work necessary to make their votes count are the ones least likely to be influenced by things like personal attacks, sweeping generalizations, and the rest of what now passes for ‘campaign literature’.
Also, as a pleasant side effect, this would eliminate a lot of votes cast by people who now just vote for the people whose names they’ve seen most often on yard signs, candidate mailings, and so on. Which would reduce the use of those items in campaigns — saving a lot of trees, and beautifying the landscape in the process.
