Could you pass a US citizenship test?



  • 85/96. At least one or two of them I should've taken a couple seconds longer and answered correctly, but I was trying to get through them pretty quickly. (I missed the Emancipation Proclamation, and I definitely know what that is. And I should've at least known that the particular answer that I picked for the question about Benjamin Franklin wasn't right.)



  • @Khudzlin said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Not much of a guarantee if the president basically throws away every campaign promise he made.

    Rule No. 1: Politicians lie.
    Rule No. 2: When they don’t lie, politicians make you believe they’ve promised things which they may not be able to actually achieve.

    … yet people still trust them and get agitated about them. Especially, it seems, when they’re obviously sticking to rules No. 1 and 2.



  • @Eldelshell said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Freedom? Really?

    If you define "freedom" as "running away from religious oppression", then that is certainly true.

    As a percentage of colonists, though, it's rather low.


  • FoxDev

    0_1459797814937_upload-4db7e444-6c25-4f8c-bdb9-c458c76195cf
    Without the stupid mistakes, it'd have been mid-80s.



  • According to about 4 minutes' research, if you are dual nationality US you have to follow both countries' laws. But if you are a citizen you have to spit on any other country.

    Does this mean that dual nationality people can never be citizens at the same time?



  • @coldandtired Here's an interesting piece of trivia:

    The Title of Nobility Clause states that nobody serving the US Government may accept a title from a foreign leader without Congress' approval first. (Congress has approved this before; notably soldiers who served in WWII were approved to receive medals from foreign armies.)

    In 1810, there was a Constitutional Amendment proposed that extended this clause to say that if any US Citizen accepted a title from a foreign leader, they would lose their US Citizenship. (Meaning, for example, Bill Gates and Stephen Spielberg among others could be expelled from the US for accepting titles from the Brits.) Both houses passed it with no expiration date; it's technically still pending State ratification.



  • @blakeyrat Talk about sore winners!

    The whole thing interests me. My sons are British by descent, but they have never been there. Are they English?

    I remember seeing Tesla top the list of greatest ever Americans which seems very odd to me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Meaning, for example, Bill Gates and Stephen Spielberg among others could be expelled from the US for accepting titles from the Brits.

    There's quite a long list (e.g., Rudy Giuliani, for assistance provided to British families who lost people in 9/11) and the titles granted typically have no implications beyond granting a particular place of honour in some ceremonies which they never need to attend anyway. Modern usage tends towards the handling of such honorary awards as being non-harmful; it'd be different if they conveyed political or military power (and the US would be right to object to them).



  • Tesla became an American citizen in 1891, according to Wiki. He's an American.

    That said, he's pretty overrated and possibly doesn't even belong on a "greatest Americans" list. His inventions worked mostly by accident; he wasn't a scientist, and he never came up with theoretical evidence of his inventions, he just combined parts and batteries in different ways until he found something that worked.

    So while he could build a remote control boat that was controlled through the water it floated in, he couldn't explain in the scientific way how or why the electrical current traveled through the water. Due to this, many of his projects (like his idea to transmit usable power through the ground) were virtually gibberish.

    He's kind of like the opposite of Da Vinci, who came up with great inventions based on coherent (and generally correct) theories he had, but most of which were un-build-able or utterly unpractical.



  • @dkf said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    it'd be different if they conveyed political or military power (and the US would be right to object to them).

    The Constitution was written in 1781.



  • @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    In 1810, there was a Constitutional Amendment proposed that extended this clause to say that if any US Citizen accepted a title from a foreign leader, they would lose their US Citizenship.

    By coincidence, I just finished re-reading The Plot Against America where Lindberg is given a Nazi medal (as he got in real life). Surprising then that this law didn't come up.



  • @coldandtired If he was a member of the US Military, in theory at least, he was supposed to get Congressional approval. (There doesn't seem to be any penalty specified, though.)



  • @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @coldandtired Here's an interesting piece of trivia:

    In 1810, there was a Constitutional Amendment proposed that extended this clause to say that if any US Citizen accepted a title from a foreign leader, they would lose their US Citizenship. (Meaning, for example, Bill Gates and Stephen Spielberg among others could be expelled from the US for accepting titles from the Brits.) Both houses passed it with no expiration date; it's technically still pending State ratification.

    If it's still pending State ratification, it's not applicable yet, is it?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Some guesses but I'm not American so *shrug*

    0_1459848370972_upload-2f6a5e59-bfa9-42b6-ba4b-43e46c4efac7


  • FoxDev

    @loopback0 That makes me a better American than you.

    I would go :P, but I don't know whether being better at being American is a good thing or not...



  • @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    The Constitution was written in 1781.

    The Articles of Confederation were written in 1777 and adopted in 1781.

    The current United States Constitution was written in 1787 and adopted (ratified) in 1789. That question bit me too: It asked when the Constitution was written and, like an idiot, I fell for it and clicked 1789.



  • I'm still not sure how knowing useless trivia means you're a better citizen rather than doing boring things like paying taxes and not killing anyone.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @coldandtired Yeah, it doesn't even ask you how many guns you own! 🔫🛂



  • @Khudzlin said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Is there a specific way to refer to the decade 1900-1910, or does it depend on context?

    Technically that's not a decade. You may have 1900-1909 (the noughties or oughts of the 1900s) or 1901-1910 (the first decade of the 20th century).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @CoyneTheDup said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    That question bit me too: It asked when the Constitution was written and, like an idiot, I fell for it and clicked 1789.

    Yeah, I had to stop and think about that. I couldn't have come up with 1787 without help (though I probably would have guessed somewhere between 1786-8), but I figured that since Washington's first term started in 1789, the Constitution must have been written before that.



  • @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    If you define "freedom" as "running away from religious oppression", then that is certainly true.

    To be fair, the Puritans were running away more from strictures against their own oppressive practices than from actual religious oppression.

    Influential people, Puritans. Judging by US workplace laws and prison policy, the freedom to do unto others as nobody should do to a dog remains central to the whole American project.



  • @boomzilla said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Yeah, I had to stop and think about that. I couldn't have come up with 1787 without help (though I probably would have guessed somewhere between 1786-8), but I figured that since Washington's first term started in 1789, the Constitution must have been written before that.

    I could have reasoned 1787 (even though I didn't know it right off) because I am certain of adoption in 1789. I was just rushing a bit too fast and didn't think through "written" versus "adopted." They asked, "When was it written?" Duh [knee-jerk] 1789. (Read the question, Coyne, then think before answering.)

    There were tricky questions.



  • @flabdablet said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Influential people, Puritans. Judging by US workplace laws and prison policy, the freedom to do unto others as nobody should do to a dog remains central to the whole American project.

    Yes, quite patriarchal in our structure:

    • Thou shalt not regulate the patriarchs, or their edifices.
    • But, but as proper authoritarian patriarchs, thou shalt regulate the indentured slavesthy inferiors.


  • @flabdablet said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @Khudzlin said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Is there a specific way to refer to the decade 1900-1910, or does it depend on context?

    Technically that's not a decade. You may have1900-1909 (the noughties or oughts of the 1900s) or 1901-1910 (the first decade of the 20th century).

    Classical off-by-one error.



  • @CoyneTheDup said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Thou shalt not regulate the patriarchs, or their edifices.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r0y_V-J3X4



  • @asdf said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @coldandtired said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Why then is the US so obsessed with Polish-Americans, and Irish-Americans, and all the rest of the ridiculous 'heritage' claims?

    Don't forget that every village with a few inhabitants of German heritage has a "German" "Oktoberfest".

    he have our own around here too
    people love their oktoberfests



  • @blakeyrat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @asdf said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Yeah, didn't know that one either.

    The women's sufferage movement didn't just happen in the US.

    If you don't know why Susan B. Anthony is famous, at least in a 3-word description on multiple choice test way, that's actually pretty shameful.

    whoever this woman is, we don't know or care around here


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Hanzo said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Just using general knowledge and watching Ami movies and series got me 80%. Can I become president now?

    • Are you a landed white maleWill you be at least thirty-five years old at the time of taking office?
    • Have you lived in the USA at least fourteen years?
    • Are you either (a natural born citizen of the USA) or (a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the constitution of the United States of America)?

    If you can honestly answer yes to all three questions, then congratulations! You can maybe possibly become the president of the United States of America!



  • 90% here (86 out of 96). Not bad for a furriner.



  • 86% (83 out of 96). A few stupid mistakes in there, though I found most of the "all of these" a bit unclear.



  • @xaade said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @CoyneTheDup

    Let's let everyone run, and everyone can vote for whoever.
    But, how would we convince the majority of the nation to trust the President if only 13% of the nation voted for him, followed by the 99 other guys that earned 7/8s of a percent.

    I've thought about this, and we would need a series of primaries. To move on to the next more general election, you would need to be in the top 50%. For example, if the first candidate had 30%, the second candidate had 20%, and everybody else had less than 20% each, the first two candidates would move on to the next one. A winner would not be declared until he had won at least 50%.



  • @chozang That doesn't solve the problem though.

    If your candidate fell below the margin on the second to last round, why would you vote again? So essentially the people that voted for the last two, last round, may be the only ones voting again. As the representation is taken to the extremes less people participate. So, back to square one.

    This is yet another reason I'm a libertarian.

    If the government has less power, then you're more likely to find a candidate that you'll vote for, because he can't change things as much.



  • @xaade said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    @chozang That doesn't solve the problem though.

    Except that it does.

    If your candidate fell below the margin on the second to last round, why would you vote again?

    In conventional language, we talk about "voting for a candidate". But we are really just expressing a preference between the candidate we are voting for and the one who we expect to win if our candidate does not. People sometimes talk about "voting against a candidate" as if that is something that isn't always happening. For a rational person, if their candidate lost in the next to last election, then they would still vote for the person they preferred out of the ones still running in the last round.



  • @chozang I don't understand why more of the world doesn't use the instant-runoff (preferential) scheme that's been working well in Australia for a century. It has its flaws, and like any electoral system it can be gamed, but by and large it delivers much less crazy outcomes than any flavour of first-past-the-post.

    The only reason that the US is completely stuck with two remarkably similar political parties is that the rise of a third party with any kind of appeal to the voters of either of the two majors would split the vote for that major and hand the election to the other one. With IRV, you can vote according to how well the candidates on offer reflect your own principles, secure in the knowledge that your vote will not be contributing to the victory of a candidate who is obnoxious to you.

    The rise of the Australian Greens is an illustration of this principle in action. There are lots of traditional Labor voters who are unhappy with the corporatist right-wing drift of the Labor party in recent decades, and many of them now vote Greens first and Labor second. In seats where there is not enough first-preference support for a Greens candidate to get elected, you don't see the Labor vote split and the conservatives taking those seats as a result. Nobody in Australia has to feel like a traitor to their principles just for voting according to them.


  • Java Dev

    @flabdablet That doesn't really compare because there are large differences between electing a parliament and electing a representative.

    If you're electing a representative (such as a president) only one person can win.
    If you are electing a parliament, a number of people equal to the number of seats in the parliament will win. Specialized distribution keys only even come into play for probably less than 5% of seats where no party has enough votes 'left over' to take the seat outright.

    EDIT: I'm not meaning to say here that a IRV system would not work better than the current US presidential election system. I'm saying that the success of IRV in the Australian parliament elections does not guarantee similar undivided success in US presidential elections.



  • @chozang said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    a series of primaries

    Those actually cost money, you know...


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @boomzilla said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Also, 100%.

    Same here.

    0_1460259634719_upload-83b5603e-a08b-452e-a1f6-b009050f1739



  • @PleegWat said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Specialized distribution keys only even come into play for probably less than 5% of seats where no party has enough votes 'left over' to take the seat outright.

    That's not how Australian elections work. To get a seat in Parliament, you have to win an instant-runoff election against the other candidates running for that seat - each seat elects only a single representative. There is no redistribution of surplus votes. It's quite common - normal even, except in very safe seats - for no candidate to have an absolute majority of first-preference votes.

    Senate contests are more complicated because there are no individual Senate electorates; each State has a fixed number of Senators to elect and everybody who lives in that State gets to choose those from the field of candidates running for that State. This is also done on an instant-runoff basis, but instead of needing an absolute majority of votes to get elected, a Senate candidate needs only to secure a quota.

    A quota is V / (C + 1) + 1 votes, where V is the total number of valid ballots cast and C is the number of candidates to be elected (note that this reduces to the definition of an absolute majority when C = 1).

    In Senate elections, there is a step where surplus votes get redistributed. As soon as a candidate achieves a quota, all the ballot papers responsible get that candidate's votes transferred as additional votes for their next-most-preferred candidate, at a value scaled down enough to "use up" the elected candidate's quota (details here). Whenever that redistribution doesn't result in any other candidate achieving a quota, the least successful candidate is eliminated and their next preferences redistributed at full value, just as happens in the single-member elections for the Lower House.

    Lower House elections don't involve the redistribution of surplus votes precisely because each electorate does elect only a single representative; as soon as some candidate has achieved their required quota (i.e. an absolute majority), the election is decided and there is nobody to distribute surplus votes to.

    The instant-runoff part, where if nobody achieves a quota then the least successful candidate is eliminated and their voters' next preferences redistributed, is always in operation and I can see no reason at all why that system should work less well for electing a President than it does for electing my local MP.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @flabdablet said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    I don't understand why more of the world doesn't use the instant-runoff (preferential) scheme

    I voted for it in the UK referendum, but the No camp had a good scare policy going on and we kept FPTP



  • What we do here (for single-seat elections, which does include representatives, as they're elected separately, like the Australian MPs) is 2 rounds of voting. To get elected in the first round, you need more than 50% of the votes. If no candidate gets that many votes, there is a second round (1 or 2 weeks later) with fewer candidates (for the presidential election, it's only the top 2, for other elections, all candidates who meet the qualification criteria can take part). Between the rounds, qualified candidates may withdraw (usually as part of a deal with another qualified candidate with a compatible platform and more perceived chances of success). Withdrawing candidates and unqualified ones usually make their own preferences known (though of course, voters are free to disregard them). Then the second round is FPTP. The result is that parties are grouped in 2 sides (called left and right), each with one major party and several minor one; the seats mostly go to the major parties, but the minor parties get minister nominations (for presidential elections) and stuff like that as part of deals. Though the major parties are trying to make it more like FPTP at the moment (instead of, you know, listening to what to voters tell them). I think IRV would be better, but given our law mandates manual ballot counting, it might take even longer to properly count the votes...



  • @Khudzlin Australia does manual ballot counting, mainly because that's the only sane way to count ballots. It scales well too.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI



  • @flabdablet Do citizens participate in ballot counting, and if so, to what extent? Because in France, ballot counting at the polling stations is done by volunteer citizens supervised by officials (said officials try to encourage you to do it). If I understand IRV correctly, each time you transfer votes (either for surplus or because a candidate was eliminated), you have to consolidate the results across the relevant polling stations (which is done by officials in France and, I assume, pretty much everywhere), then count the ballots again based on that, unless the first count separates ballots not just by first choice, but by full sequence of choice (which makes for a lot of piles).



  • @Khudzlin said in Could you pass a US citizenship test?:

    Do citizens participate in ballot counting, and if so, to what extent?

    To the best of my knowledge, all the actual counting is done by employees of the Australian Electoral Commission. Citizens can act as scrutineers, supervising the counting process at the polling places after they close, if appointed by the candidates.

    A preliminary count of first preferences gets done in each polling place, and the results get phoned through to the central counting office. Then the ballot boxes are sealed (observed by the scrutineers) and then physically transported to the AEC offices for the complete count.

    The results used to be centralized and collated on great big tally boards, but although the counting is still done by hand and observed by candidates' scrutineers, the collation and totaling is now done on the AEC computer system.

    The AEC website documents all this stuff in excruciating detail.


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