Unpopular Opinion

I've often thought there should be some kind of civics test before voting, but it comes with a host of problems. For instance, a well meaning person who meets all your criteria might always test poorly because some people just don't test well - so they get denied a vote.

The other big problem is that you can't be sure that the people making the test aren't corrupt themselves.

Personally, I look at your list and they're all things I tend to agree with. But what happens when people don't agree about the disqualification criteria?

Religious fundamentalism is particularly thorny. How do you separate a harmful viewpoint from a benign sense of spirituality? Where's the specific point that someone has their rights stripped away because the testers don't agree with their belief? Someone who follows the teachings of Christ is vastly different from someone whose dogma includes hatred and science denialism - and yet somehow they both could be christians active in their church.

Your stance on AI and Big Tech are also things I agree with. But I could also see a scenario where being against those things is what disqualifies people. For instance, a politician could make the argument that these are forces of innovation (ew) and that opposing them should have you disqualified. Either because it's in the nation's economic interest to do so, or because being against AI is an anti-science viewpoint.

Again, I'm against AI and most scientists probably agree. But that's something that the masses typically don't care about. When it comes time to vote on what gets included on your list I think it's more likely that people will be taken in by the platform that promises tech, money, and power versus the platform that wants to take away their convenient hallucination machine.

People also can very easily do great harm with good intentions. Example, there were movements opposing nuclear power on environmental grounds. Generating electricity with coal, oil, and gas was seen as cleaner if you can believe that. As a result, many proposed nuclear power plants were never built, some were shut down, and the climate crisis moved steadily towards the boiling point.

If your list came out in, say, the 1970s then I wouldn't be surprised if "supporting nuclear power" disqualified you from voting. After all, it's a technology that brought us the most powerful weapons of war we've ever used on each other.

Anyway, all this to say: I think you've got a good list, and you recognize that many of our democracies are broken. But disqualifying people from voting has great potential to do harm - either through the corruption we can see in our governments today, or through misguided but otherwise noble intentions