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Your To Vote - A history

The right to vote during these Usa is at once both our greatest privilege and our most important responsibility. For over 200 years brave patriots have shed their blood to guide and defend our democracy. Given the significance of the upcoming elections, I might hope that everyone who's permitted to vote will do so. Unfortunately, the U.S. has one of many lowest voter participation degrees of any democracy on earth. Why not a brief search for the long, hard fought struggle toward the universal to vote provides some incentive to make it for the ballot box later.

As a few of my readers may know, when this country was formed, only white male home owners had the right to vote. In fact, several colonies even had religious requirements to vote, many 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 weren't lifted with no 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 keepers to obtain suffrage, Thomas Dorr is discovered responsible for treason in 1844 and sentenced alive imprisonment at hard labor (although he was pardoned the subsequent year.)

Following 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 idea of a black man voting was intimidating to a lot of in the north of manchester as well as the south, and downright blasphemous with a. Many schemes were devised to maintain blacks from voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests and cumbersome registration requirements. Blacks, of course, weren't the only once excluded in the vote. Many western states denied the legal right to vote to Asian-Americans also.

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From the 1950s, many southern states retained poll taxes and literacy tests built to disenfranchise blacks. In Alabama, for instance, prospective voters were required to provide written answers to a 20 page test including questions including: "Name the rights one has after he's been indicted with a grand jury." As the Civil Rights Act of 1957 assisted enforcement of voting rights, black voter registration in the south was just increased by around 200,000, just 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 in the city, but 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 put into the rolls.

Dr. King's heroic work, however, stirred the country. 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