Chewbacca passes exam, should we all?

I was reading an interesting tid-bit the other day.

Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca in four of the Star Wars movies) has become an American citizen. He loves a Texan, so good for him.

Yahoo news story

What really caught my eye though was this line:

Candidates also must pass history, English and civics exams.

Sounds good to me, maybe not necessarily the history, but the English and civics certainly. But this is the exam to be a citizen. Surely it would be more appropriate to put this sort of testing in to be a voter? American born and immigrants alike, some sort of qualification to be determining the future and direction of the country would be a wise idea.

I know the electoral college was designed to get around the unwashed masses casting their uneducated votes, but the electoral college is a joke. They don't cast votes proportional to the state vote, and they don't educate them selves and disregard the uneducated votes, so why bother? The electoral college doesn't do the thing it was instituted to do, and it doesn't remove itself from the process either in effect or actuality.

I submit that in the interests of the future stability of the country, there should be some basic understanding requirement for voters. They need to know what they are voting on and how the voting process works. They need to show they are capable of educating themselves on the specific issues too. Whether they then make random choices or choices I may disagree with is their right, but why should my government be influenced by someone who doesn't understand what they are doing, or what is relevant?