Thoughts on MLK, Jr & the Our Wonderful Equal Rights Voting History
It's been nine days since the anniversary of Martin Luther King's birthday (January 15th) and seven since the country's official day of recognition for the man... so here I am, late to the event again. But in the intervening days a lot has gone on (or a lot has been made evident in what has NOT gone on) in the area of making voting an easier reality for all U.S. citizens.
Note the word "all" in that last sentence, the absence of which bit Mitch McConnell on his Kentucky rump last week. "African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans," (emphasis in bold is my doing) was part of a reply he made to a question at a press conference on whether voters of color were being harmed by Congress' failure to pass any meaningful election reform/protection. After an uproar over his apparent feeling that black voters were not Americans, he got in a huff over what he felt was an "outrageous mischaracterization" of his record on voting rights.
Maybe. But the refusal of the Senate Republicans to legislate voter protections and overturn efforts by certain states to make voting harder, especially for minorities sorta kinda negates any claim he can make to being a champion of voting rights.
How have we done as a nation when it comes to fair representation on election day? –– an election day for which workers are not legislated time off from their jobs to vote, making it impossible in situations where a voter spends hours in line at the polls for a minimum wage-earner to cast a ballot... A national holiday would certainly help those voters.
Anyway, here's a little history on voting in the U.S., with thanks to www.constitutioncenter.org, to which I turned when researching this topic (and I paraphrase here and add editorial opinion/comment).
1789: The Constitution is ratified, leaving it up to the states (and this is where things start stinking up the topic) to decide who is eligible to vote. By and large, the white landowner was the only person with the right to cast a ballot. Note that in figuring out Congressional representation, the each state's total population was counted (though slaves only counted as three-fifths of a person, if I remember my history correctly). Those wily founding fathers from Virginia and the South (and there were a bunch of them drawing up the Constitution... Jefferson and such) needed those slaves to count in their numbers.
1870: The 15th Amendment forced the states to recognize people of color, stating that the right to vote could not be denied based on race. Almost. Native Americans did not get the right to vote until 1924, as they were not recognized as citizens of the land their people had inhabited for 10,000 years or so. Oh, and gender wasn't covered in that amendment, as women had to wait until...
1920: The 19th Amendment ensured that voting could not be denied on the basis of sex.
But some state legislatures (yeah, the states can constitutionally figure other ways to make voting rough) had policies of poll taxes and literacy tests, which reduced voting by people of color, immigrants and low-income folks.
1965: The Voting Rights Act, passed during LBJ's administration (see my post on that guy who should be remembered for his domestic policies, but who gets crucified for his disastrous handling of the Vietnam War), was designed to make sure that states could no longer "pass laws or policies that denied citizens the right to vote based on race and other immutable characteristics."
We're seeing a time when state legislatures are testing the limits again and meddling with options that allow them to overturn/modify electoral numbers and disregard numbers that they don't appreciate... and control election boards and officials to which they don't cotton.
Yep, that sticky subject of 'states rights' is rearing its ugly head again.
Peace to all, and remember to vote as if your life depended on it (democracy's life in this country definitely does)
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