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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

When Newsweek asked a thousand voters to take the official citizenship test a few years back, nearly 30 percent couldn’t name the vice president, more than 60 percent did not know the length of U.S. senators’ terms in office, 43 percent couldn’t say that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights, and only 30 percent knew that the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Now David Harsanyi writes at the Washington Post that if voting is a consecrated rite of democracy, as liberals often argue, surely society can have certain minimal expectations for those participating [washingtonpost.com]. And if citizenship itself is as hallowed as Republicans argue, then surely the prospective voter can be asked to know just as much as the prospective citizen. Let’s give voters a test. The citizenship civics test will do just fine and here are some of its questions, which run from easy to preposterously easy [uscis.gov]: “If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?” “There were 13 original states. Name three.” “What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment?” "What is freedom of religion?

According to Harsanyi, if you have no clue what the hell is going on, you also have a civic duty to avoid subjecting the rest of us to your ignorance. To be fair, the contemporary electorate is probably no less ignorant today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. The difference is that now we have unlimited access to information. Of course, we also must remember the ugly history of poll taxes [wikipedia.org] and other prejudicial methods that Americans used to deny black citizens their equal right to vote. Any effort to improve the quality of the voting public should ensure that all races, creeds, genders and sexual orientations and people of every socioeconomic background are similarly inhibited from voting when ignorant. As James Madison wrote, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy [uchicago.edu]; or, perhaps both.” "If you forsake the power of information," concludes Harsanyi, "you have no standing to tell the rest of us how to live our lives."

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