> "Do you want to repeal suffrage?"

> And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.

“Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?)

People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.

> “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote.

No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is not confusing, just absurd.

Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)

To be fair, most people have a hard time understanding the word "hypothetical" or realizing something different from the status quo.

I like sortition myself, but yes it is absurd.

Why?

Voters are vulnerable to trick questions, is basically what I'm reading in this thread, and by this.. we are to judge that they must be _very_ stupid. Yet.. no one offers any evidence that their elected representatives do a better job at passing these same tests.

How anyone puts this down to anything other than a failing of school systems and the mass media in general is somewhat beyond me. It's easier to poke fun of people than dig into the problems in many spheres, I'm sure, but in this one.. I think you're just enabling a specific class of people to slickly pervert the will of the citizenry while still claiming a moral high ground for having done so.

Still not convinced this is anything other than an elitist trick.