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Your Directly to Vote - A history

The right to vote in these Usa reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For over Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who's permitted vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy in the world. What about a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote provides some incentive making it towards the ballot box the following month.

As a number of my readers may have heard, if this country was formed, only white male home owners had the right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, over the first half of the 1800s, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. Out of the box often the case, sometimes these restrictions were not lifted without a fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading the battle for non-property owners to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced your imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the following year.)

After the civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the proper of U.S. citizens to vote without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Tragically, another century would pass before persons of color could fully start to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to many both in north of manchester and also the south, and downright blasphemous to some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, obviously, were not the only once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans too.

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From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, as an example, prospective voters were required to provide written solutions to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights a person has after he's been indicted by way of a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration in the south was only increased by about 200,000, a mere fraction from the eligible black population.

In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a voter registration drive in Selma Alabama. During those times, blacks slightly outnumbered whites in the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance from the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a good single black voter from being included with the rolls.

Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the world. On January 23, 1965, the 24th Amendment was passed banning the usage of the poll tax. Later that year, President Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, eliminating all litera