US voters should have to pass a citizenship test in order to be able to vote, but only for Senate and Presidential candidates

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.

In 1970, Congress voted to extend renewable portions of the Voting Rights Act for five more years. They also added some new provisions to the act.

The 1970 amendments included a nationwide ban on literacy tests and reduced residency requirements that could be applied in presidential elections.

The 1970 reauthorization also reduced the voting age [link to AGE subpage] in national elections from 21 to 18 years of age. Though this provision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court for non-federal elections, the voting age was permanently lowered by passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971.

17th Amendment

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any state in the Senate, the executive authority of such state shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, that the legislature of any state may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

Amendment 24 [source says XXIV but this is numerically same as 24]

ABOLITION OF POLL TAXES

Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964

SECTION 1

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.

SECTION 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

One-Person, One-vote Rule

The rule that, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, legislative voting districts must be the same in population size. The idea behind the rule is that one person’s voting power ought to be roughly equivalent to another person’s within the state. See Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

The Naturalization Test

To become a naturalized U.S. citizen, you must pass the naturalization test. At your naturalization interview, you will be required to answer questions about your application and background.

The 1975 Amendments extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for seven years. Established coverage for other minority groups including Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans. Permanently banned literacy tests. Passed by the 94th Congress (1975–1977) as H.R. 6219.

The English test has three components: reading, writing, and speaking. Your ability to speak English will be determined by a USCIS Officer during your eligibility interview on Form N-400, Application for Naturalization. For the reading portion, you must read one out of three sentences correctly. For the writing test, you must write one out of three sentences correctly.

Certain applicants, because of age and time as a permanent resident, are exempt from the English requirements for naturalization and may take the civics test in the language of their choice.

'Maximal unification so long as it is believed that the voters are capable of making decisions for themselves'.

"The US views voting as something that isn't the same an informed decision requiring incredible wisdom and self control but simply one that once you can consent and are a citizen you can vote"

"The U.S. Citizenship is not a literacy test (at all) and doesn't test linguistic capabilities beyond studying a set of predetermined questions" - Con in Round 2. Argument about 15th Amendment.

In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, (1959), the U.S. Supreme Court held that literacy tests were not necessarily violations of Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment nor of the Fifteenth Amendment. 

"The opinion of the court, delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, held that provided the tests were applied equally to all races, were not "merely a device to make racial discrimination easy," and did not "contravene any restriction that Congress, acting pursuant to its constitutional powers, has imposed," the literacy test could be an allowable use of the state's power to "determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may be exercised."

"If (uninformed) voters are weeded out by failing to pass a citizenship test, then the influence that these people would have in electing politicians would be substantially reduced"

When you think of 'American ideals' and other 'core' things that the US likes to claim it stands for/is the protector of, a few things can come to mind.... "Defending Democracies overseas", "Defending Human Rights", "Freedom from Tyranny", "Freedom of Speech and Religion", "Right to Defend oneself" are all ones I can think of off the top of my head. You can probably think of many more that I haven'e even listed. 

All of these things can be jeopardized when uninformed voters are able to sway the outcome of a close contest to elect worse politicians the nation would otherwise get.

A voter who thinks the sun orbits around the Earth could conceivably believe that global warming is a lie as well, and therefore vote for a politician who wants to drastically expand government surveillance laws, simply because that politician said in a commercial that he also doesn't believe in global warming.

"Hopefully the truth will come out."

"Woodrow Wilson was the US president in the 1920s and he said there was a shadow government above him pulling the strings."

"I am going to put it all behind me. I've not enjoyed this process in the slightest."

"I got kicked out of church, I got unfriended by many people because of what I believe, that the Moon landings are fake."

Contrary to popular belief, it’s a misconception that many societies of serious, educated people ever actually believed in the flat Earth theory. “With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat,” historian Jeffrey Burton Russell noted in 1997. “A round Earth appears at least as early as the sixth century B.C. with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere.”

 A voter who doesn't know what the 1st Amendment is could vote for a politician who wants to ban all mosques just because the politician talks the same way he does. A voter who only listens to Alex Jones for news may vote for a politician that would outlaw gay marriage just because that candidate is a man and the other he is facing is a woman. 

The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was passed in 2003 with unanimous support from both parties in Congress. The purpose of the act was to “provide for the analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape in Federal, State, and local institutions and to provide information, resources, recommendations and funding to protect individuals from prison rape.” (Prison Rape Elimination Act, 2003). In addition to creating a mandate for significant research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and through the National Institute of Justice, funding through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Corrections supported major efforts in many state correctional, juvenile detention, community corrections, and jail systems.

The act also created the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and charged it with developing draft standards for the elimination of prison rape. Those standards were published in June 2009, and were turned over to the Department of Justice for review and passage as a final rule. That final rule became effective August 20, 2012.

In 2010, the Bureau of Justice Assistance funded the National PREA Resource Center to continue to provide federally funded training and technical assistance to states and localities, as well as to serve as a single-stop resource for leading research and tools for all those in the field working to come into compliance with the federal standards.

If a person is convicted of first-degree murder in the state of Vermont, he or she will retain the right to vote — even while incarcerated.

But a person who commits perjury in Mississippi could be permanently barred from casting a ballot there.

It is up to states — not the federal government — to say whether convicted felons can vote, and which ones, and when. So the rules for convicted criminals can change, sometimes drastically, from one state to the next.

In most states, felons cannot vote while they are in prison but can regain their voting rights after they are released (as in Massachusetts and Hawaii), after they complete their parole (as in Colorado and Connecticut), or when they are no longer on parole or probation (as in New Jersey and Texas).

California relaxed its rules a little in 2016. Convicted felons sentenced to county jails there can now vote while in custody, but the shift did not apply to those who were sentenced to a state or federal prison.

And there are two states that do not revoke criminals’ right to cast a ballot: Vermont and Maine. There, felons can vote even when they are behind bars.

“The state disparities are really astounding,” said Christopher Uggen, a professor of sociology and law at the University of Minnesota who also worked on the 2016 Sentencing Project study. “It is definitely confusing at election time, and many former felons are risk-averse — they may not vote if they are afraid of getting a felony conviction for illegal voting.”

Voter identification laws are a part of an ongoing strategy to roll back decades of progress on voting rights.  Thirty-four states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws, under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government-issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot – no exceptions.

Voter ID laws deprive many voters of their right to vote, reduce participation, and stand in direct opposition to our country’s trend of including more Americans in the democratic process. Many Americans do not have one of the forms of identification states acceptable for voting. These voters are disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities.  Such voters more frequently have difficulty obtaining ID, because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining government-issued photo ID card.

After the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case weakened federal oversight over state and county election laws, the debate over whether these and other more restrictive laws have discriminatory effects has mostly been waged in the realms of ideology and intent, with most existing studies relying on data limited by time, place, or bias.

The catch-22 of course is that the laws have to be passed and solidly in place first to have robust longitudinal data on their effects, which in this case would mean potentially discriminatory effects would have already impacted elections. A new study from researchers Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson at the University of California San Diego is one of the first to analyze certified votes across all states after the implementation of voter laws in multiple elections, and it found just that kind of racially discriminatory impact.

Specifically, they found “that strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans in primaries and general elections.”

The authors note that the existing research tends to point to three things: that strict voter ID laws requiring identification to cast a ballot do in fact reduce turnout by some amount, that turnout reduction tends to work in Republicans’ favor, and that differential effects have been observed along class and education lines, but not race. But the UCSD researchers call those conclusions into question, noting that analyses based on elections data before 2014 could not have collected comprehensive enough data to rule out racial suppression, and that analyses that sidestep that limitation by relying on survey data tend to fall victim to people of color over-reporting if they voted in prior elections.

"If we admit that democracy is a US core value, than the best way to achieve democracy is to allow as many who are proven capable of deciding for themselves (capable of actual legal consent)" 

"In a decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the court emphasized that [...] not only “are States allowed to remove registrants who satisfy these requirements, but federal law makes this removal mandatory" 

Supreme Court Majority Opinion on the case ruling that Ohio's voting registration purge was constitutional, and that a person who did not vote in a previous election could have their registration stripped: http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-justices-rule-for-ohio-in-voter-registration-dispute/

"In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, (1959), the U.S. Supreme Court held that literacy tests were not necessarily violations of Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment nor of the Fifteenth Amendment. "

"The opinion of the court, delivered by Justice William O. Douglas, held that provided the tests were applied equally to all races, were not "merely a device to make racial discrimination easy," and did not "contravene any restriction that Congress, acting pursuant to its constitutional powers, has imposed," the literacy test could be an allowable use of the state's power to "determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may be exercised."

How will you get freedom from Tyranny if they start filtering out people who believe non-conventional beliefs?

What is going to jeopardise democracy more than anything else is a way to restrict voters who are concluded to be full-fledged, loyal citizens of the US and who are banned from voting due to a lack of knowledge or who oppose some mainstream ideas. 

The US Citizenship Test method of screening would prevent people who actually support the First Amendment and don't know what the Amendment is on a test to score too low to vote, but would allow a voter who opposed it and knew that it was the First Amendment to vote.

Pro has to explain why we should keep the law banning ex-cons from voting since clearly an intelligent and well-informed ex-con is going to have more right to vote in the eyes of Pro than a less informed law abiding citizen

Why is it necessary for everyone to be identically informed and to know exactly the same as one another in order to permit them to vote?

Pro has no more right than those he opposes to prevent someone believing in his core values or theirs to vote.

Voter ID [...] frankly has nothing to do with screening out those who 'don't know something' in any shape or form.

"The fact that Pro keeps referring to other ways that voters are restricted in order to justify this one is in no way at all relevant to the debate since I have already explained that the current restrictions are nothing to do with knowledge and are being opposed heavily from many angles.

On top of this, the US Naturalisation/Citizenship Test is a bit of a joke when it comes to legality. Not only is half of it a literature test which is outright illegal due to the 1970 and 1975 Amendments....

"If a flat-earth supporting, global-warming denying and/or free-speech opposing candidate is able to run for President and gain an active voter base that would mean it is the Media and correctly-informed candidates and news stations who should put in the work and improve their capability to inform voters"

 "It, in no way at all, is the voters who should be restricted and punished"

"The minute we begin to punish voters for knowing too little who are full fledged citizens of the US, we are not taking responsibility for whose fault it is that they are uninformed"

Throughout this debate Prop has been pushing forth a notion of there being too severe a prevalence of stupidity amongst voters. In order to prove this, Prop provided shaky evidence at every point that highlighted that there are people with outlandish ignorance of facts (or what Prop believes to be facts). From Sceptics of the Holocaust to Sceptics of NASA and the Earth being round, Prop has kept highlighting that there are people who lack information (which offends or disgusts Prop on a personal level it seems) and that they cannot therefore have the right to vote until they prove they believe what others believe to be true as a matter of fact. Even if this alone doesn't disgust or worry you, I fully combatted this line of attack in Round 3. I explained the following:

The US Naturalisation/Citizenship Test is not going to filter out flat-earthers at all because people who believe the Earth is flat are more likely than Round-Earthers to know precisely what NASA is, which department of the government funds it and the details of what it has brought forth regarding Global Warming. That's right, contrary to popular belief, the flat earthers are the ones who are likely to know those details and pass the space-funding section of the test regarding what tax money goes to fund more than your average round earther since they are so concerned with that money as they consider it wasted and NASA to be enacting an elaborate lie. Extremely similarly, people who are actually against freedom of speech and other means of expression are going to know exactly what the First Amendment is since they will be fighting against it and know what their opposed legislation is whereas it's far more likely that someone who is happy to have that freedom and takes it for granted isn't going to know too specifically which Amendment it is and is likely to be the one to fail that part of the test.

Excerpt ... the other part of the Citizenship Test has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, it tests for knowledge that sure, is partly to do with Politics but do not in any way imply the one who gets better percentage is a more intelligent voter.

Something I want to quickly establish here is that loyalty has nothing to do with intelligence, what Pro is actually advocating is to test for intelligence by testing for loyalty and then using a test that tests solely for knowledge.

Loyalty =/= Intelligence =/= Knowledge

I will leave this as it is for now and let Pro defend their case but I reiterate: Nearly every single thing that Pro said most voters don't know in Round 1 is not tested for in the US Citizenship/Naturalisation Test.

The last portion of Con's argument against the resolution is that because the US citizenship test does not test for common facts like the ones I mentioned in round 2 (Does the Earth revolve around the Sun, What is Auschwitz, etc) it would therefore do nothing in terms of signaling which voters are smarter or more intelligent.

This argument is both blatantly false and a bit of a mischaracterization of what the overall goal of the resolution is. Having voters be able to pass a citizenship test in order to vote for president or senators will not eliminate ALL voters who could be ignorant about important issues..... Thats not what the goal of the resolution is.... The goal of having voters be required to pass a citizenship test to be able to vote for senators and presidents is that it would REDUCE the number of uninformed voters casting uninformed votes that could alter the outcome of elections for the worse, as I mentioned in this quote from the conclusion of my 1A argument:

> "If (uninformed) voters are weeded out by failing to pass a citizenship test, then the influence that these people would have in electing politicians would be substantially reduced"

[Pro quoting themselves from R2]

Furthermore, voters who think the sun revolves around the Earth or don't know ANY branches of government would almost certainly not know other questions that are on the citizenship test. A study that asked Americans questions that are found on citizenship tests found that 16% of Americans missed 4 out of 5 randomly selected questions, meaning they only got 1 question right at most out of 5 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/30/poll-americans-citizenship-test/86559188/ . I'm willing to bet that a good chunk of that 16% of Americans are also among the 33% of Americans who cannot name ONE branch of the government, or the 60% of millennials who don't know what Auschwitz is.

Let's ignore both those factors. If a flat-earth supporting, global-warming denying and/or free-speech opposing candidate is able to run for President and gain an active voter base that would mean it is the Media and correctly-informed candidates and news stations who should put in the work and improve their capability to inform voters. It, in no way at all, is the voters who should be restricted and punished. The minute we begin to punish voters for knowing too little who are full fledged citizens of the US, we are not taking responsibility for whose fault it is that they are uninformed and not going to have candidates promising to better educate and inform the populace since that would cost more money and the informed wouldn't care about the oppressed uninformed knowing more (and over time they will know less and less so on and so forth).

On top of this, the US Naturalisation/Citizenship Test is a bit of a joke when it comes to legality. Not only is half of it a literature test which is outright illegal due to the 1970 and 1975 Amendments but most of the Civics Test is going to do nothing but punish voters for being poorly taught in schools and by the media things that they should be regularly told and informed of.

I believe I have fully made my case here and sufficiently torn apart Prop's Case at its fundamentals let along its added points on top.

Also, the fact that Prop keeps referring to other ways that voters are restricted in order to justify this one is in no way at all relevant to the debate since I have already explained that the current restrictions are nothing to do with knowledge and that they themselves (especially voter IDs) are being opposed heavily from many angles.

You cannot test people for knowledge, justify it as wanting intelligent leaders and then say you have filtered out disloyal or sinister voters and leaders at all. I hope I have made this crystal clear.

The minute we begin to punish voters for knowing too little who are full fledged citizens of the US, we are not taking responsibility for whose fault it is that they are uninformed and not going to have candidates promising to better educate and inform the populace since that would cost more money and the informed wouldn't care about the oppressed uninformed knowing more (and over time they will know less and less so on and so forth).

I will argue that the citizenship test as its intended use in the resolution is not the same as a literacy test, and also that literacy tests are not inherently unconstitutional.

The English test has three components: reading, writing, and speaking. Your ability to speak English will be determined by a USCIS Officer during your eligibility interview on Form N-400, Application for Naturalization. For the reading portion, you must read one out of three sentences correctly. For the writing test, you must write one out of three sentences correctly.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.

The 1975 Amendments extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for seven years. Established coverage for other minority groups including Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans. Permanently banned literacy tests. Passed by the 94th Congress (1975–1977) as H.R. 6219.

In 1970, Congress voted to extend renewable portions of the Voting Rights Act for five more years. They also added some new provisions to the act.

The 1970 amendments included a nationwide ban on literacy tests and reduced residency requirements that could be applied in presidential elections.

The 1970 reauthorization also reduced the voting age [link to AGE subpage] in national elections from 21 to 18 years of age. Though this provision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court for non-federal elections, the voting age was permanently lowered by passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971.

Amendment 24 [source says XXIV but this is numerically same as 24]

ABOLITION OF POLL TAXES

Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964

SECTION 1

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.

SECTION 2

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The rule that, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, legislative voting districts must be the same in population size. The idea behind the rule is that one person’s voting power ought to be roughly equivalent to another person’s within the state. See Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).