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Your To Vote - A Brief History

The legal right to vote over these United states of america reaches once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For upwards of Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to support and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I'd hope that everybody that is permitted to vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation levels of any democracy in the world. Perhaps a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will provide a little bit of incentive making it towards the ballot box the following month.

As a few of my readers may have heard, if this country was formed, only white male home owners had the legal right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, most of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, on the first 50 % of the 19th century, the requirement of property ownership was abolished. As they are a fact of life, sometimes these restrictions weren't lifted with out a fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading the fight for non-property proprietors to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was found responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the subsequent year.)

After the civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the best 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 commence to claim this right. During reconstruction, the thought of a black man voting was intimidating to numerous in the north of manchester and the south, and downright blasphemous with a. Many schemes were devised to help keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, needless to say, were not the sole once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the authority to vote to Asian-Americans also.

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From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests made to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for example, prospective voters was required to provide written strategies to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights a person has after he has been indicted with a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration inside the south only agreed to be increased by around 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 within the city, however the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their finest efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented a good single black voter from being added to 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