Equal Rights Voting is Not Going to Expire This Year
Via the rumor mill and Snopes:
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding “2007 as the year we may lose Equal Rights Voting”. As per usual, Snopes has been kind enough to illustrate thatthis simply is not true.
The right to vote for all (males) regardless of color was secured with the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment_15
And: http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am15
Section 1. 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 race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was established to allow for Federal enforcement of equal-rights voting within the individual States. This was renewed for 25 years by Congress and signed by President Bush last year, well in advance of the 2007 expiry date.
“The prohibition of voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of slavery was first codified by the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870. Soon after the failure of Reconstruction, southern states found other means besides those enumerated in the Fifteenth Amendment to deny the vote to blacks, through violence, intimidation, via Jim Crow laws that included literacy tests, poll taxes, and also grandfather clauses that permitted otherwise disqualified voters whose grandfathers voted (thus allowing some white illiterates to vote), all with the aim and effect of re-imposing racially motivated restrictions on the voting process that prevented blacks from having political and economic power.”
— Source: Wikipedia article on The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Even though we live in some dark and troubled times of suspect legislation and shadowy government actions, the looming threat of equal-rights voting being allowed to expire is one monster-under-the-bed we can truly see as the pile of stuff (and nonsense) that it truly is.
Stay sharp, and stay educated, because knowledge is power.
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