Ep. 72 - Voters Should Be Required To Take A Civics Exam
We say that it's everyone's civic duty to vote. That's not exactly true. It's everyone's civic duty to be informed and contributing members of society. If they haven't fulfilled that duty, then it's extremely bad for them to vote. An ignorant, self-centered vote serves only to cancel out the votes of informed people. We could easily solve this problem by holding voters to a very basic standard of awareness and maturity.
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So I saw a video floating around on Facebook that I think was originally published last week, and it was another one of those Jimmy Kimmel dumb guy on the street segments.
And yeah, these things get old after a while, because first of all, we get it, right?
I mean, there are a lot of idiots in America.
We understand. We get it. You don't need to keep proving it to us.
We're on board. We know.
Yes. It's kind of depressing, so I'm not really in the mood to laugh about it anymore.
Maybe the first few times we started seeing these videos was kind of funny.
Now it's just not funny anymore.
It's just really sad, and that's all.
And also, we know that these are not exact—this is not scientific research here, because anytime you see one of these segments— And the implication obviously is, oh, we went down to the streets and we had this really simple question and we couldn't find anyone who could answer it correctly.
Well, no, you definitely found some people who could answer it correctly, but you didn't put them in the video because then it detracts from the humor and it detracts from the point you were trying to make.
The point is that people are stupid.
So that all, of course, is true.
However, as cynical as I am and as jaded as I am by these dumb guy interviews, this one still jumped out at me.
And was even more depressing than usual.
In this video, maybe you've seen it, people were given a map of the world without any of the countries named on it.
And they were asked to just point to one country on the map, just one.
And it could even be their own country.
And they were able to find, Jimmy Kimmel's producers were able to find several presumably literate and presumably educated adults who could not point to one country on the map.
Not even their own country.
Now they did find several people who pointed to Africa, which of course is not a country, but they were not able to find, or they were able to find a number of adults who could not point to one single country.
And that is, that truly is incredible.
Because if you can't point to one country on the map, that means that you have zero knowledge of geography.
That's one of the most basic academic subjects, and you have zero knowledge of it.
None. I mean, it's incredible.
And it brings me back to a point that I have made many times and I will now make again.
And I know that when you see these videos, the first thing that you think is, wow, these people vote.
That's the really scary and depressing thing, is that these people can't point to a country on the map, yet they go and vote.
And my point is, and I know this seems very scandalous and it's very upsetting to a lot of Americans with their modern sensibilities, but I really believe that we need to find some way To legally stop these kinds of people from voting.
We could see so many improvements in our system, in our culture, in our society if we could just stop ignoramuses from voting.
Now, if you're like the majority of Americans, then you probably labor under the faulty assumption that everybody should have the right to vote, that this is one of the most essential, fundamental rights, and everyone should be able to do it.
You may even think, and I'm always shocked when I encounter people like this, but there seems to be a popular view, that somehow America is improved, our society is improved by high voter turnout and high voter participation.
You always hear this in the media, every...
Every election season where we got to get the voting, we got to get voter turnout.
We got to get more people involved, more people voting.
Doesn't matter if they have any knowledge.
We just need to get more people there.
We just need warm bodies in the polls.
We just need people voting.
They could be voting based on absolutely nothing.
We just need them there.
This is this idea we have that somehow It is an objective good to just have a bunch of people voting.
Even if half of them have no idea where they are, they're just wandering in in some kind of half-drunk stupor.
It's good.
It's good because it's participation.
In what other context would we suggest that participation in and of itself is like some kind of good thing?
As long as you're participating, it doesn't matter what the reason is of your participation, it doesn't matter the quality of the participation, just participate.
It should be of interest that our founding fathers, that would be the people who came up with our system, They never had this idea in mind.
They never thought that the best way to run the country is to just have everybody voting.
They only gave the vote to landowners.
And of course, that had the effect of automatically disenfranchising black people and women, which is very bad.
Thankfully, over the course of the next century and a half, voting has been opened up to those groups.
And now we no longer discriminate based on race or based on gender, which is great.
But somewhere along the line, we got it into our silly little heads that Because we shouldn't discriminate based on race and gender, that means we shouldn't discriminate based on anything.
So we rightly did away with racial and gender discrimination at the polls.
We ran way too far in the other direction.
And then we did away with all forms of discrimination at the polls.
And I think that's where we went wrong.
We went way to the other end of the, way to the other extreme, way too far.
I think it's very clear That voting should be a discriminating process.
And you absolutely should be subjected to some forms of discrimination when you go to vote.
In fact, you're already subjected to some forms of discrimination at the polls.
That most people agree should be there.
Think about age discrimination.
Now, there are some people who want to lower the voting age, which I think is a very stupid idea, but you rarely hear anyone say that we should just get rid of the voting age and anyone of any age should vote.
Like, let's have eight-year-olds vote.
Almost everyone agrees that eight-year-olds should not vote.
Now, why? Why do we all agree that an eight-year-old shouldn't vote?
What's the reason for that?
Well, the reason is that eight-year-olds don't know anything.
And they are not in any way whatsoever contributing to society.
They are entirely dependent on their parents.
So let their parents vote, but not them.
So it's interesting.
We all agree. For that reason, that's the reason that eight-year-olds shouldn't vote.
But then we have to ask ourselves, are there in America a significant number of people Who essentially have the maturity and intelligence of eight-year-olds.
And who are about as self-sufficient and who contribute as much to society as eight-year-olds.
And if those people exist, should we allow them to vote?
And if we do allow them to vote, on what basis do we stop eight-year-olds from voting?
When they're basically the same.
Now remember something.
Our politicians...
You'll never hear a politician say what I'm saying right now.
For obvious reasons.
Probably political suicide.
But also, politicians for the most part, especially the bad politicians, they really love it when a lot of people vote.
They want to get those numbers up.
They want to drive people to the polls, right?
Why is that? Because they know that the majority, that I should say, informed, intelligent, mature voters are in the minority.
And those are the scary ones to the politicians, especially the bad politicians.
The bad politicians, if you are an informed, mature, intelligent voter, the bad politicians especially are afraid of you and they hate you.
And they would love it if they could stop you from voting, but they can't.
So instead, their plan is, we're going to take your vote and we're going to drown it in a sea of stupidity.
We're going to cancel it out by having a bunch of ignoramuses vote so that your vote no longer matters.
That's why they like having high voter turnout.
And that's why they're afraid of low voter turnout.
Because when they know that when the voter turnout is low, that means that it's going to predominantly be the really invested and interested people who voted.
And those are the scary ones.
Those are the ones you don't want. They want the high voter turnout.
And that's why you'll even see they're going to organize campaigns to have buses show up and just pick people up.
People that are just laying on their couch watching reality TV with Cheeto crumbs on there, they're going to send people in to lift them up and carry them.
They could still be in their pajamas.
It doesn't matter. Stay in your pajamas.
We will lift you into the pole, carry you.
So it requires no effort from you whatsoever, and we'll just bring you in.
And yeah, we want those people to vote.
People who otherwise would make no effort whatsoever.
We want them, from the politician's perspective, we want them in the polls.
Because those are the ones who are easily manipulated.
And those are the people who aren't going to hold us accountable because they have no idea what's going on.
Now, we may say that, and I hear this a lot, that, well, you know, it's our civic duty to go vote.
It's a civic duty.
No, not exactly.
Or it is, but with qualifiers.
You see, your first civic duty is to be informed, aware, invested, and contributing.
So your first civic duty is to be an informed, aware, invested, contributing member of society.
That is your first civic duty.
If you have not completed that duty, if you have not completed step one, Then you absolutely should not graduate to step two, which is voting.
And it's crazy, I think, for us to say that, well, even if you haven't done the first thing, you should definitely still do the second thing.
What? Why?
Your duty is not to just vote.
Your duty is to make informed, intelligent votes.
That's your duty. Voting in and of itself is nothing.
So all these people that, oh, they go vote based on nothing.
They go vote based on, like, whose last name they think sounds the coolest.
And then they put their I voted sticker on and they say, I voted.
You shouldn't be proud of that.
You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed that you went and voted based on nothing.
You should be ashamed that you just canceled out somebody's informed vote just so you could get a sticker.
It's shameful. It's embarrassing.
You didn't do your duty, you did the opposite of your duty.
If you're not informed, if you're not aware of anything, if you can't point to a country on the map, if you don't know anything about our system of government, then your duty is to stay home and not vote.
And then learn something, and then next time around, go vote.
So here, I think if we wanted to correct the problem, if we wanted to make some improvement, if we wanted to make drastic improvements to our society and our system overnight, I think we could instate three changes.
And I know that these three things will never happen, but I'm going to suggest them anyway.
The first two things I'll just say quickly.
The first thing is, I think we have to get rid of early voting.
You know, when we refer to voting day, in reality, it's more like voting week or voting month.
Because it's too ambitious, I guess, to expect citizens to get to the polls during a particular 12-hour span.
And so we want to give people the chance to just leisurely kind of saunter in and vote whenever they want.
We're trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone.
I think that that's the wrong way of going about it.
We want to make it a little more difficult.
We want to require people, if they're going to vote, they got to make some sacrifices.
They got to really put it in their schedule.
We got to make it a little bit harder because that way only the people who really care are going to vote.
And those are the only ones we want voting, the ones who really care.
So if...
Maybe we still allow a day early, two days.
But if the only way you're going to vote is if you have like a whole month to do it, well then you obviously don't care that much.
In which case, what's the point?
So I think we do away with early voting.
I think the second thing is we only allow taxpayers to vote.
That would be people who are contributing.
Only taxpayers can vote.
And I would stipulate, by the way, that we would include married couples.
If you're a married couple, and at least one of you is working, then you can both vote, right?
But the point is, we want people who are contributing, who are chipping in.
But more importantly, is we want people who have something at stake.
Because taxpayers, they're the ones who are really invested.
And they're the ones who can get primarily screwed if we get bad politicians in there.
I think it's always been recognized that it's a bad situation when people can go to the polls and vote themselves money.
Right? When they can vote for benefits and entitlements for themselves without having any skin in the game whatsoever.
That's a bad situation.
So when people who aren't contributing at all to the public treasury, when they get to go to the polls and decide what happens with everyone else's money, I think that's a bad situation.
And then the third thing, and this to me is the most important thing, and if we could only do one of the three suggestions that I'm making right now, and again, I know we'll do none of them, but if we could only do one, I would say We should require every voter to take and pass a very basic 5th grade civics exam.
Just like 10 questions, 5th grade level, so you don't need to be a genius.
You don't need to be an expert.
It's not AP level stuff we're talking about.
It's just, do you know, are you smarter than a 5th grader, basically?
Do you know about as much about our system of government as we would expect a 10-year-old to know?
And if you don't, then obviously you shouldn't be voting, right?
If you think that airplanes fly on pixie dust, then you shouldn't be in the cockpit.
If you don't know...
The right temperature for chicken, if you don't know what temperature chicken is supposed to be at before it's consumed, then you shouldn't be cooking in a commercial kitchen or any kind of kitchen, really.
And in a similar way, if you can't name the branches of government, then you don't belong in a voting booth.
I don't even think this is really a debatable position.
This is just, right, isn't this self-evident?
If you lack even basic fundamental knowledge about our government and about our laws and about the current political scene, you should not be anywhere near a polling station on voting day.
Look, it's nothing personal.
I have nothing against you. You are a person equal in dignity and value to all other people.
But your vote is not equal in value.
Your vote has no real actual value because it's based on nothing.
Now, I'm not suggesting that every voter should have a degree in American history or political science.
I'm just saying that every voter should have a basic grasp on the system that they are now taking part in.
So I would suggest just a simple 10-question quiz covering some really basic questions and If you answer, let's say, seven out of ten correctly and you show your ID,
then you can vote. If you can only answer, let's say, four to six questions correctly, then your voting privileges will be suspended for, let's say, two or three years to give you time to kind of catch up and learn a few things.
And if you can answer zero questions correctly, then you should be deported to Canada.
Sorry, Canada. That would be the...
Anyway, if I were dictator of the country, that's the system I would have in place.
Maybe a more realistic goal would just be answer 7 out of 10 correctly and you can vote.
Now, it'll never happen, but think about the changes that would occur to our system if something as simple as this were instated.
If every person voting just had a fifth graders understanding of our system and of the world, think about the changes.
And all of the changes would be for the better.
I can't think of one single negative change that would happen because of this.
There would be a lot of negative changes for bad politicians who are now being held accountable.
And of course, that's the reason why this will never happen, because it would require politicians to come up with this idea and instate it, which they will never, ever do.
So we're kind of stuck with the system as it is.
But I think it's helpful to have this conversation because it helps us understand how voting is supposed to work and what the point of voting actually is.
And so that even if there's never a system put in place to weed out the ignorant people, maybe at least we can encourage people who know that they are ignorant, we can encourage them that when voting day comes around, just stay home until you have cured yourself of your ignorance, and then you can partake in this wonderful thing called voting.
That's my suggestion.
Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening.
