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Why There Must Be Qualification Tests for Voting
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In western democratic societies, people have gotten used to almost absolute freedom: of speech, consciousness, self-expression, gender roles, and so on. Freedom of political will is among the benefits American and European societies enjoy as well; no one can be forced to vote this or that way, and even though during elections politicians fall over themselves to convince the electorate to vote in their favor, there are no guns pressed to voters’ heads: a person is free to vote any way he or she likes, or to not vote at all. At the same time, voting is not just a right: it is also a great responsibility of every member of a society, because each vote contributes to the results of elections, which in their turn will define the way society will have to live until the next election.
And this is probably the greatest catch: since in modern democratic societies a right to vote is granted to any citizen having reached a certain biological age, the political future of each particular society depends on a large mass of random people. In other words, not only knowledgeable, intelligent, conscious, and competent people with reasonable political positions can vote—and this is a problem. Why? Let us figure out why.
He suggests that people who know little to none about politics, how governments and economies work, and how political solutions affect societies—in other words, people ignorant about politics—should not be allowed to vote.
It might sound shocking at first, but people have got so used to their rights and freedoms that even the slightest limitation looks like totalitarianism to them. But, for example, how many Americans unsatisfied with Donald Trump’s rule are there? How quickly has his rating dropped since the moment he was elected a president of the United States? This data can be gathered on the Internet easily, so there is no point in discussing it here; what is important, however, is how Trump became president, and what was his target audience. Attentive observers must have noticed how primitive and naive his speeches were, how easily he blamed everyone, promised to build those infamous walls against migrants, and “Make America great again.. If his electoral base was not so ignorant and craving for quick solutions, it would question their candidate more, and would probably find out that there was no solid basis behind his loud words; as a result, America might have had a different president now, and the whole political course of the country could have been different.
Ignorant and poorly-educated people always make the majority of the population. Ancient Greeks knew that; nowadays praised for inventing the democratic form of rule, Greeks had numerous limitations for those who wanted to participate in the political life of their society. Many of them would be unreasonable to implement today: to tell a long story short, a right to vote belonged only to free male citizens of Ancient Greece’s cities (Inside Loyola), and some Greek city-states also required voters to match additional criteria, such as education or a certain level of income. This way, Greeks filtered those social categories who were biased towards certain subjects; for example, poor people would obviously vote for candidates who promised to make them rich, ignorant and uneducated people would vote for those who promised them unearthly goods and happiness, and so on. By granting the right to vote to few, Greeks ensured that those few were educated, knew about the current problems of the city-state they lived in, understood how the system worked, and were interested in the best possible outcomes for everyone could vote.
The idea of making citizens pass a special test to ensure their ability to make informed decisions during elections might seem limiting and somewhat authoritarian. Many people have got so used to their rights and freedoms that the idea of even the slightest limitation makes them scared. However, there are reasons to believe that qualification tests could not damage, but heal and improve the political system of the United States, because such tests would ensure that, metaphorically speaking, little children will not put forks into electrical sockets—meaning that ignorant people who have no idea about how the United States’ society works will not be able to affect its life through voting during its elections.
there you go, its the whole essay! ;}
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