The Voting Rights Act that was enacted due to purposeful hoops placed for those trying to gain the right to vote during the Jim Crow days, such as having to pass literacy tests and civics tests, and has been gutted recently, resulting in a slew of new laws enacted by some states to make it hard once again, such as doing away with early voting, requiring costly IDs, and closing many polling places, as to make it harder for poorer people to vote.
Take
Rosanell Eaton for example.
"In 1942, the 21-year-old Eaton took a two-hour mule ride to the Franklin County courthouse in eastern North Carolina to register to vote. The three white male registrars told her to stand up straight, with her arms at her side, look straight ahead and recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory. After she did that word for word, they gave her a written literacy test, which she also passed. Eaton was one of the few blacks to pass a literacy test and make it on the voting rolls in the Jim Crow era.
"In 2013, after voting for 70 years, she became a casualty of North Carolina’s new voter-ID law, which goes into effect this year, because the name on her voter-registration card (Rosanell Eaton) did not match the name on her driver’s license (Rosa Johnson Eaton). Beginning in January 2015, Eaton undertook a herculean effort to match her various documents and comply with the law. Over the course of a month, she made 11 trips to different state agencies—four trips to the DMV, four trips to two different Social Security offices, and three trips to different banks—totaling more than 200 miles and 20 hours. “It was really stressful and difficult, [a] headache and expensive, everything you could name,” she said."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/welcome-to-the-first-presidential-election-since-voting-rights-act-gutted-20160623
Jun 24, 2016 @ 02:37:13
