Should we require passing a test in order to vote? Let's hear from
Fox & Friends on this one, because
Fox & Friends is the lead paint of news.
On Monday, Utah Civics Education Initiative co-chair Lorena Riffo-Jensen told [Fox & Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck] that requiring a civics test was a good first step for encouraging students to be involved in the community.
Hasselbeck suggested taking the idea “one step further” by requiring a test to vote. [...]
“I think, personally, that anything you can do to ensure that our young people, our families are involved in civics, learning the history of our country is a positive,” Riffo-Jensen agreed. “And furthermore, how can you go into planning what the generation will do in the future if you’re not prepared and understanding where we have been… You cannot be engaged without having the full knowledge and understanding of your nation.”
“It’s a more meaningful measure when you vote perhaps too,” Hasselbeck declared.
Well sure, polling tests have a rich and storied history in the United States. That ought to be the first question on any new polling test, in fact—
describe past instances in which polling tests were used in America and why.
Mind you, I think most of us have at one point pondered whether you ought to be able to pass a basic quiz about the issues you're going to be voting on before you vote on them. The problem, of course, is who writes the test, and in general the people most eager to institute them would be the people themselves most distant from the plane of reality that the rest of us inhabit. If we had polling tests in Texas they'd probably be written by the same people who write Texas's new social studies textbooks and you'd only be allowed to vote if you could correctly explain how all of climate change was just an elaborate plot by Big Science to hurt Ma and Pa Oildrum. In Chris Christie's New Jersey the questions would all center around how Chris Christie had nothing to do with that bridge thing so shut up about that already. And can you imagine what would happen in Kansas?
But the real problem for Fox News viewers would be that any polling tests we could come up with would primarily disenfranchise, well, Fox News viewers. They'd get the nullification questions wrong, and the establishment clause questions would be a train wreck; geography would winnow the voting lines considerably.
So good news, viewers of Fox & Friends: Elizabeth Hasselbeck was just blowin' smoke. You still don't have to know a damn thing in order to get in that booth. Or run for office. Or pass our actual laws. Or, and this is especially important, to appear on our news programs.