[Diamond]

... truth be told, it IS pretty trivial and pretty easy, if you can think.

Which is of the following is the correct answer to question 27?
"right"
"right from the left to the right"
"right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here"

[yarddog]

Question 30 can’t be answered unless you guess what they were asking.

[Nervous Tick]

That’s a great example.

A benign point of view would consider the thrust of the question: to see if the test taker knew English well enough to understand the difference between “Write” and “right”, two English homonyms. Taking the test, I would assume the benign intent and write “Right” as the right answer.

A malevolent (but not unreasonable) point of view would be that ANY of the three answers you illustrate — and maybe even others — were “correct”, and the grader could pick and choose in order to arbitrarily disqualify a voter.

It gets back to the important question: does the fact that a literacy test COULD be used arbitrarily invalidate the whole concept of testing voter literacy?

Clearly a literacy test, to be fair as well as effective, must be carefully designed and uniformly adminstered and graded. Clearly this particular example lends itself to abuse.