Voting age

[Tetro Kornbluth]

would anyone like to offer a rebuttal to my idea?

but I also favor offering a complicated civics exam.  and anyone who can pass it, whether they're 4 or 17, should be eligible to vote.

I would. Who exactly would write this civics exam? The goverment backed school Authority? I would hope not or else it would be children swallowing the gruel they learn in school and make it actually needed for an important aspect of citizenship. Also it would alienate those who don't do well in a civics exam and thus turn them off the political process even more then it would already. In others greater an even greater division between the "informed" (Whatever that is) elite and the "great unwashed". It's a horribly elitist idea..

And that's not to mention that who is more likely to fail a civics test? Some spoilt Paris-Hilton wannabe whose daddy spends buckets load on private education for his "princess" or some black kid from Rural Mississippi whose parents think education is holding him back from doing proper jobs; like menial labour.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

When did you become a Anarcho-Syndalicist Tweed?

Anyway I know you are not an elitist; just saying that it's a horribly, horribly elitist idea.

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That stretchs the word "oppression" quite a bit. But if you tone down the rhetoric I would agree with you..

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I don't really see how the States goverment is better than the federal system. (If you were to ask my honest opinion I'd say the United States is too big a country and it would be better in the long run if it broke up.. but Imagine the chaos on the forum If I said THAT). The only way you could have a reliable testing system is if they were ran by the schools themselves; If 1) the schools were independent of goverment and 2) non-profit or at least communitarian. But this idea is unworkable because each school (and how many schools are there in the US?) would have it's own test, each with it's own standard difficulty, etc.

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Fair enough point but still how one defines "informed" and "intelligent" is really up to debate. If history has taught us anything it's how things can be rigged; so say to be "intelligent" you have to claim that homosexuality is disease (to use an extreme example; it's usually more subtle than that.)

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No comment except to say that nowadays it's very difficult to see the "working class" as a single entity; especially obvious when we are talking about the division between Rural and Urban.