That grandfather clause was ruled unconstitutional in 1915. Poll taxes were abolished in 1964 with the 24th Amendment and literacy tests were outlawed under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 19th Amendment was the first amendment that assured women in the United States the right to vote by stating "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." However, when ratified 100 years ago, the 19th Amendment did not guarantee Black women the right to vote.
According to National Geographic, "In fall 1920, many Black women showed up at the polls." In Kent County, Delaware, their numbers were "unusually large," according to Wilmington's News Journal, but officials turned away Black women who "failed to comply with the constitutional tests."
"Even though theoretically women, Black women for example, should have had the right to vote under the provision, as a practical matter, we know that that certainly was not the case and remains not a fully realized reality for many Black women, women of color in this country," Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the Voting Rights Project for the ACLU, told ABC News.
"[As for gerrymandering,] I think that's very much tied into the story of voter suppression even though I think a lot of times people think of it as something a little bit different," Lakin said.
Gerrymandering is also considered to be another form of voter suppression as it is defined by Merriam-Webster as "to divide or arrange (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage." Christina Greer, an associate professor of Political Science at Fordham University, said gerrymandering "ultimately does hinder people from the right to vote."
"[It] either dilutes their vote, or it makes it hyper-concentrated so it dilutes in other places. It's packing and cracking and you can use mathematical solutions to look at a state, and look at where people of color are, especially Black people in a particular area distributed throughout the state," Greer said. "And you can make districts where you can either pack them all into one or two districts."
After the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, several changes within the United States government were made to get more people registered to vote. Lowering the age to vote from 21 to 18 with the ratification of the 26th Amendment during the Vietnam War, allowed more people across the country to register to vote. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the "Motor Voter Act," for example.
However, the fight to get more people to vote and the progress that came after the Voting Rights Act came to a screeching halt after the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, changed the way the Voting Rights Act was implemented nationwide.
In a 5-4 decision, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. According to the Department of Justice, "Section 4(a) of the Act established a formula to identify those areas and to provide for more stringent remedies where appropriate. The first of these targeted remedies was a five-year suspension of 'a test or device,' such as a literacy test as a prerequisite to register to vote." The 2013 decision ruled that "the coverage formula set forth in Section 4(b) of the Act was unconstitutional, and as a consequence, no jurisdictions are now subject to the coverage formula in Section 4(b) or to Sections 4(f)(4) and 5 of Act. Accordingly, guidance information regarding termination of coverage under Section 4(a) of the Voting Rights Act (i.e., bailout) from certain of the Act's special provisions is no longer necessary."
Chief Justice John Roberts said the Voting Rights Act was based on the "decades-old data and eradicated practices ... such [literary] tests" and that they "have been banned nationwide for over 40 years."
While Jim Crow laws were banned nationwide because of the act, the floodgates were opened to allow states across the country to implement "massive dents" to the voting infrastructure in the United States, according to the Brennan Center.
After Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Republican lawmakers around the nation began attacking the voting methods (that until that point were no issue) used in the election. More than 250 bills in 43 states (as of March, 2021) have been proposed by GOP lawmakers meant to restrict voting.
Take strict voter ID. These laws require voters to present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, and they offer no fallback options for people who do not possess one of these IDs. Like their Jim Crow predecessors, voter ID laws are defended by reference to a racially neutral need to defend the "integrity" of elections. Specifically, defenders claim that voter ID laws are needed to combat voter impersonation fraud. But study after study has shown that voter impersonation fraud is vanishingly rare. Many claim that these laws impose little burden because everyone has the requisite ID. However, the reality is that millions of Americans don't, and they are disproportionately people of color.
In 2019, Tennessee created new hurdles for third-party voter registration drives in response to a "large-scale effort to register black voters" ahead of the 2018 election.
In 2017, Georgia enacted an "exact match" law mandating that voters' names on registration records must exactly match their names on approved forms of identification. In the lead up to the 2018 election, 80 percent of Georgia voters whose registrations were blocked by this were people of color. (A lawsuit forced the state to largely end the policy in 2019.)
Furthermore, the Brennan Center has documented a surge in voter purges, the sometimes error filled process by which officials remove allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, in jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting.
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