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I've often thought it would be informative to have candidates take the citizenship test.
Most natural-Americans would fail.
You’re right though. It would be.
I found a sample test with 133 questions. I got 126 of them for 94.74%.
There were a few history questions that threw me, specifically related to the federalist papers of which I've got scant little memory.
I felt like the rest of it was pretty straightforward. I also think recent divisiveness has made a lot of the questions related to how the federal government is structured a lot easier.
As to your assertion that most natural Americans would fail, I'd flip a coin on that. Maybe? Probably?
Those of us on lemmy are probably outliers.
Assuming most Americans couldn't pass it, that explains a ton of politician rhetoric. They say things that are functionally impossible, but if the voter Is entirely unaware of how the government is structured and functions, then they'll eat it up and cast their vote, frequently against their own well being.
The vast, vast majority of voters have no idea how government works. And this is actually one of the few things that both sides are guilty of: incredibly uninformed voters.
The way our government works is actually pretty complicated and I'm confident in saying that most Americans have only a very basic understanding of it. That's also largely not their fault. Civics education in this country is a joke.
It does make them very easy to lie to or mislead.
When I became a citizen there was no written test. The guy did ask 3 questions:
What's the carrying capacity of a swallow?
African or European?
2 henways.