Opinion: Five best ideas for fighting voter ignorance

 Listed herewith are the five winning suggestions for fighting voter ignorance. The entrants will receive certificates of outstanding civic merit. Unfortunately, the legislature abolished the cash award as a budget-balancing move.

Dear Editor:

So you want help in solving the voter ignorenc crisis which is a good idea. Every sober citizen should see we need to improve voter intelligens when he sees how the fools gave the U.S. of Congress to the Democrats and they elected all those wimmen. I hope the House of Representatives has a kitchen. My suggestion is literacy tests a week or two before the election, with no answers at the back of the book. I would be glad to right up the test.

Yours trooly,

Mugs McGrant, Citizen

Mugs: Sixty years ago, Congress outlawed literacy tests so they cannot be used for voting.

Dear Editor:

Thank you for asking my help in solving the ignorance crisis at the polls. It is obvious that the voters are overloaded with too many decisions so we need to cut back on voting. In the first place, the legislature recognized this fact when they divided the elected state officials between two elections­— some this time and some next time.

Most states get by with only half the state officials. Voters don’t even know who these candidates are, let alone judge their qualifications. Who is the state treasurer? Who is the insurance commissioner? I’ll bet you don’t know. Let the governor appoint these people and he can be responsible for them.

Bertie Burnstead

Bertie: Several efforts have been made to reduce the number of elected officials but the public has killed all of them because we’ve always elected this many.

Dear Editor:

I propose that we match the offices to be filled with the intelligence of the voters as measured by the last grade in school. So straight “A” students would get to vote on all the offices. A “B” student would not vote for governor but for most other state officials and judges. A “C” student would vote for public service and county commissioners.

When it comes to the ballot measures, only people with master’s degrees would vote. This way we would be matching the importance of the office with the intelligence of the voters. You only need to be a jerk to vote for some of them. And if you do you are a jerk.

Huggum Thompson, M.A.

Dear Editor:

With all of this new technology around, we could simplify the whole voting process by adapting the system to the voters we have. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on the way to Iraq: “We have to go to war with the army we’ve got.” So we have to run our democracy with the voters we’ve got.

I propose we give voters a 10-question exam on the way into the polls. The technology prints out red (smart), yellow (average) and blue (mediocre) tabs keyed to certain voting machines upon which appear only the names of the candidates for whom electors are qualified to vote.

Bertram Riser

Dear Editor:

Thank you for listening to my idea for dealing with ignorant voting. If it is dangerous to let ignorant people vote, then maybe we ought to reduce the number of times we expose the government to their ignorance by having longer terms of office, like eight years for governor, 10 years for other state officials and lifetime for judges. Heck, most of them rust in for years anyway.

Buster Burnside

Lloyd Omdahl is a member of the Democratic- NPL served as the Tax Commissioner of North Dakota from 1963-66 and was the 34th Lieutenant Governor of North Dakota from 1987-1992. He also was a professor of political science at the University of North Dakota.