Should Americans Have the Right to Vote?

Ideas for America | Series 48 #2 | Wednesday’s Edition

Should voting be a right or a privilege in the United States?

That’s an inflammatory question, but it’s one Americans should be willing to consider.

According to the University of Pennsylvania’s 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, 35 percent of American adults could not name all three branches of government. Only 9 percent could name all five rights protected by the First Amendment. (Annenberg Public Policy Center)

That is a lack of knowledge, the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.

But more devastating is Americans’ inability to reason.

28% of U.S. adults are at level 1 or below in literacy, 32% are at level 1 or below in problem solving, and 34% are at level 1 or below in numeracy, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES, 2023 PIAAC Results)

Level 2 literacy proficiency includes the ability to compare or combine two or more pieces of information, sometimes when competing information is present. (OECD, Education at a Glance 2025) Yet 28% of American adults ages 16 to 65 scored below that level. Another 32% scored below Level 2 in adaptive problem solving. (NCES, 2023 PIAAC Results) These results raise serious questions about how effectively large portions of the population can evaluate complex information and make informed decisions. Yet they can all vote.

Many Americans lack both education and critical-thinking skills.

So should voting be restricted to people who demonstrate a basic understanding of the issues and the ability to reason through them? Political power based on knowledge or competence is called epistocracy. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I’m not saying everyone reaches the same conclusions. Two informed, rational people can examine the same evidence and come to different conclusions.

The question is whether voters should be capable of understanding the choices they’re making and evaluating the consequences in order to have the right to vote.

Unfortunately, the United States has an ugly history of using literacy tests and other voting restrictions to exclude Black Americans and other citizens from voting. (National Archives)

In Mississippi, for example, from 1955 to 1965 voters were required to interpret sections of the state constitution. Registration officials selected questions and judged the answers, giving them the power to decide who passed and who failed. (Smithsonian National Museum of American History) Guess who always failed?

Any proposal to assess voters’ knowledge or reasoning abilities would have to confront that history.

Who would set the standards and decide what counts as sufficient knowledge or adequate reasoning? How do you prevent those standards from being manipulated to exclude people with different political beliefs?

America’s founding fathers restricted voting rights to white men who owned property. (National Archives) There is no question that this was outright racism and discrimination, but it was also the belief that people without sufficient education lacked the judgment to make political decisions. (Smithsonian Institution)

Democracy depends on voters making informed decisions, so what happens when voters lack the knowledge or reasoning skills to do that?

Should the U.S. have an epistocracy?

I’d like to know what you think.

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