George Rebane

The comment stream under
‘How to Protect School Children in Schools’ is another long one which inevitably becomes a bit hairy by developing threads that start covering the waterfront of issues of interest in these times. Voter qualification was a thread that, to the best of my knowledge, appeared through some process of immaculate conception. While entirely appropriate to the season, that thread diverts quite a bit from the posted topic and deserves its own venue for discussion. This is it.
My long held position has been that more than being able to fog a mirror should be required of a US citizen before he is allowed to vote; even more than gaining a majority of 18 years, or not having been convicted of a felony, or not being institutionalized as a mental incompetent. In short, there should be some intellectual and/or cognitive skills that the citizen should demonstrate that may even alleviate the majority and/or mental incompetency requirements. But what would these skills be and how would they be measured and certified?
Our Founders recognized similar requirements and left it to the states to set the specifics. Many required the demonstration of substance through ownership of land, or commercial interest, or wealth. Various levels of these were judged to be a sufficient proxy for some minimum level of intellectual and cognitive skills. Later, and mostly under Jim Crow laws, specific tests were imposed that required literacy (gasp!) and a basic knowledge of US civics. These were struck down under various civil rights rulings.
So now we have a nation of voters who are 40% functionally illiterate, almost totally innumerate and innocent of science, and possess no essential knowledge base of how their governments at any level are constituted and work. These people are supported by certain of our political minions as long as they can be reliably convinced to vote for bigger government, concentration of federal power, and more transfer payments paid for by higher taxes from the producing class. And their proportion, as demonstrated by the last election, is such that we are now way past the tipping point at which democracy begins to devour itself.
So, before I taint the discussion with my own prejudices on voter qualifications, can you dear readers present any reasonable basis for change, if any, and if so, what kind?
[29dec12 update] This post’s comment stream is now mature enough to detect some trends in how the title question is being answered. First, what some of the progressive readers have confused are the orthogonal notions of 1) what improvements could/should be made to the voting franchise that is granted to some citizens, and 2) what is the likelihood that any given set of changes to voter qualifications would actually be adopted.
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