Most college students think America invented slavery, professor finds
On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.
Oy.
I maintain that quizzes such as this should be integrated into the voting booth. Collect a pool of hundreds of question like this, and provide each question with six unambiguous multiple choice answers. The computer tallies up your answers. Four, five or six correct answers, your vote counts. Two or three correct answers, your vote counts half. One or zero, your vote doesn’t count. When you vote, you are given a receipt that shows that you voted and what your votes were (which I believe most electronic voting machines do now anyway), with an indecipherable code at the bottom. The *following* *day,* you can go online and enter that code, and it’ll tell you how you did. By doing so the following day, people who did poorly won;t go bugnuts and trash the voting establishment.
The vote-quiz could be made available for weeks in advance. This is something you’d have to do on-site, presumably inside a Faraday cage to keep people from Googling the answer. By having a registered quiz answer in advance, people could still vote early or vote by mail.
Some people will claim that a voting test like this would be racist (or sexist, or transphobic, or whatever goofy hobbyhorse they happen to ride). I suspect that many of these same people believe that voter ID laws are racist. Those people should watch this: