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Your Directly to Vote - A history

The right to vote in these United States are at once both our greatest privilege and our most significant responsibility. For more than Two centuries brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I would hope that everyone who is eligible to vote is going to do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of the lowest voter participation amounts of any democracy on the planet. What about a brief exploration of the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal right to vote will provide some incentive to make it for the ballot box the following month.

As some 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, on the first 1 / 2 of the 1800s, the necessity for property ownership was abolished. Out of the box a fact of life, sometimes these restrictions were 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 the fight for non-property owners to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr was discovered accountable for treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the next year.)

Following the 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 thought of a black man voting was intimidating to many both in its northern border and also the south, and downright blasphemous for some. Many schemes were devised to keep blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, of course, are not the sole once excluded from the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans as well.

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From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests made to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, 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 got been indicted by way of a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration within the south only agreed to be increased by around 200,000, only fraction of 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 within the city, nevertheless the voter roles were 99% white. Despite their utmost efforts, stiff resistance in the racist and segregationist establishment successfully prevented even a single black voter from being included with the rolls.

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