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Your Right to Vote - A history

The authority to vote over these United States are at once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For over 220 years brave patriots have shed their blood to aid and defend our democracy. Because of the importance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everybody who is permitted 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 investigation of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal directly to vote will provide a little bit of incentive making it for the ballot box later.

As a few of my readers may know, once this country was formed, only white male homeowners had the right to vote. In reality, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, many of which lasted until 1790! Gradually, within the first half of the Nineteenth century, the advantages of property ownership was abolished. As they are often the case, sometimes these restrictions are not lifted with out a fight. In 1842, the Dorr war was fought in Rhode Island over this very issue. For his troubles in leading your dream for non-property keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced your imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the subsequent year.)

Following your civil war, in 1870, the 15th Amendment was ratified guaranteeing the right 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 begin to claim this right. During reconstruction, the concept of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in the north and also 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, of course, are not the only real once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the right to vote to Asian-Americans too.

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Through the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests designed to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters was required to provide written solutions to a 20 page test including questions such as: "Name the rights an individual has after he has 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 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. At that time, blacks slightly outnumbered whites inside the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their best efforts, stiff resistance from your racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented even a single black voter from being put into the rolls.

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