Do we really want to encourage every American to vote?

Barack Obama has been flying around the country, delivering speeches designed to encourage people to vote. “As a fellow citizen, not as an expresident but as a citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it,” he admonished students at the University of Illinois.

And while I see nothing wrong with people voting — as long as they vote the way I do — I’m not sure encouraging people to vote is such a good idea. Because people who have to be nagged into voting probably aren’t the ones we want deciding who’s going to be running the country.

It’s not as if they didn’t already know there was an election coming up. Most elections are occasionally mentioned by various news media and even Americans whose major source of information is Instagram probably have heard something about them. Besides, there already are all those “get out the vote people” insistently knocking on our doors, clogging our mail boxes and calling our landlines just as we’re sitting down for dinner.

According to researchers, those methods have varying rates of success: one vote is gained for every 15 doors knocked upon, one for every 35 phone calls made and one for every 273 pieces of direct mail. Additional research indicates that get-out-thevote efforts are often most effective when potential voters are told to do so “because others will ask.” In other words, they’ll vote mainly to avoid being embarrassed in the eyes of their neighbors. Another survey found that that ease of access to polling locations had the largest impact on voter turnout.

I don’t know about you, but it worries me to think our democracy depends upon people who only vote to impress their neighbors and that the polling place isn’t too inconvenient.

So instead of nagging people to vote, my suggestion is that they should want to vote and be willing to pass a test to prove it. I’m not suggesting we bring back the days in which tests were used to discriminate against some groups of people, but maybe questions could include:

1) How many branches of government are there?

2) What color is the house in which the president will live?

3) Which party is the donkey and which is the elephant?

At the very least, people who show up at the polls should be able to attest that they have heard at least one campaign speech before they can cast their ballots. Except for people who BELIEVE what they heard in a campaign speech.

Those people should be encouraged to stay home on Election Day.