[The literacy test is at the end.]
Voting facts
Why did many states impose poll taxes?
Blacks males were granted the right to vote by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870. After that time, some states seemed to use poll taxes as a means to prevent blacks from voting. However, that is not the whole story. Poll taxes had been used for decades prior to blacks gaining the right to vote. In many cases, the poll tax was tied to the back taxes (property taxes) owed by the voter. The logic was this: If a citizen did not meet his civic obligation to pay taxes, why should he get the right to vote? All poll taxes were banned by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964.
When did literacy tests become widely used?
After black males gained the right to vote (in 1870), many southern states began imposing literacy tests to dramatically reduce voting by black men and, in some cases, poor white men. The tests could be quite difficult to pass, and often the answers were subjective enough to allow the graders to pass— or fail— just about anyone at will. A sample test is found below. Give it a try!
How many phony signatures were found in Arizona’s 2020 election?
In January, 2022, an engineer with several degrees from MIT was commissioned by the Arizona Senate to perform a signature test on a scientific sample of ballot documents from the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai acquired a representative sample of 499 ballots envelopes, and had the signatures compared to verified signatures. The comparisons were made by a panel of 6 people— three of whom were forensic document examiners. With regard to 12 percent of the sample, all 6 reviewers were unanimous: The signatures on the envelopes did not match the signatures on file. In all likelihood, many or most were phonies. By extrapolating that finding to the voting population of Maricopa County, Ayyadurai estimated that up to 204,000 signatures in the county were questionable. That number is about 20 times greater than Biden’s winning margin in the election.
How were “Grandfather clauses” used to suppress the vote?
In the 1890s and early 1900s some southern states passed laws stating that any person who had the right to vote before 1867 could continue to vote without needing to take a literacy test or pay poll taxes. The law was also applied to that person’s descendents. Since most blacks could not vote prior to 1867, those laws unfairly and illegally limited many blacks from voting. In a unanimous ruling in 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled these statutes to be unconstitutional.
Can 4,000 ballots be scanned within a single second?
Cyber experts at VoterGA.org (a 501c3 tax exempt entity) examined ballot images from the 2020 election held in Fulton County, Georgia. Although it takes about one second to scan a ballot to produce an image, they discovered that over 4,000 ballots had precisely the same timestamp — to the second. In March 2022 VoterGa.org reported other strange anomalies: 16,034 mail-in ballot authentification files (.sha files) were added several days after scanning. That is a technological impossibility because the authentification files are created simultaneously with the image files. 17,724 final certified presidential recount votes had no .tif files, which are ballot images. That is also impossible because the image is needed to create a “cast vote record,” which is needed to tabulate the vote.
Early voting machines had more moving parts than any other machine of its day.
At least, that is the claim of Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa. After researching the machines, he stated that voting machines weighed hundreds of pounds and had more moving parts than automobiles or other machines. The voting machines were very expensive, and were usually installed in a corner of the local town hall, where they would sit for decades.
When registering voters, states can’t ask for proof of citizenship.
Voting by noncitizens is a growing problem across the nation, especially in some key southern states. The Motor Voter Act of 1993 created a voter registration application form prescribed by the Federal Election Commission. That form does not require documentary proof of citizenship, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling (in 2013) made it clear that states could not require documentary evidence of citizenship status for voters in federal elections.
Voice voting dominated for the first 50 years of elections.
With this system, everyone knew exactly for whom you voted. Upon arrival, the voter would be asked to state, under oath, if he had voted before. If he hadn’t, he would announce his name and the candidate of his choice. His vote would be recorded by the court clerk.
A war led to a change in voting age.
To many people it seemed very unfair to draft young men to serve in the Vietnam war, yet deny them the opportunity to vote. This led to a lowering of the voting age to 18, in 1971.
Department of Justice investigated election fraud for just 4 days.
On November 9, 2020, Attorney General William Barr issued a memo to his staff, authorizing them to “pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities . . . if there are clear and apparently credible allegations . . . that . . . could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election . . .” That day, the head of the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch quit. Four days later, 16 other members of the unit wrote to Barr, urging him to rescind his memo. No serious efforts were made after that.
The Republican Party led the way for the suffrage of women.
As was the case with the abolition of slavery, Republicans were the primary force leading to women’s suffrage. In 1878, the 19th Amendment was introduced by Republican Senator A. A. Sargent; however, the amendment was defeated four times by a Democrat-controlled Senate. When Republicans gained control of congress in 1919, the Equal Suffrage Amendment finally passed the house and Senate. When submitted to the states, 26 or the 36 states ratifying the Amendment were controlled by Republicans.
Originally, Washington, D.C. residents could vote in Presidential elections.
New York and then Philadelphia were the centers of government for the United States until 1800. Until then, residents of the D.C. region could vote. Once D.C. became the seat of government, known as Federal City, Congress terminated the voting rights of its citizens. Those rights were finally restored in 1961 with passage of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution.
A 54-mile march triggered the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which focused primarily on workplace discrimination, the voting rights of Black Americans were often impaired by literacy tests and other impediments to voting registration. In an effort to encourage increased registration of black voters, hundreds of people marched from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, Alabama— a 54-mile journey. Along the way, many marchers were attacked by white vigilante groups. The protesters, who were protected by National Guard troops, reached their goal after 3 days. A national outcry over the violence paved the way for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Act banned literacy tests and mandated federal oversight of voter registration in certain areas where literacy tests and poll taxes had been used. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal oversight provisions had achieved their purpose and were no longer needed or constitutional.
Europe has much more stringent voting requirements than U.S.
People are sometimes surprised to learn that the U.S. has some of the least restrictive voting rules in the world. As noted by John R. Lott, Jr.:
Of the 47 countries in Europe today, 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote. . . . When it comes to absentee voting, we Americans, accustomed as we are to very loose rules, are often shocked to learn that 35 of 47 European countries— including France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden— don’t allow absentee voting for citizens living in country.
In Wisconsin, nursing home patients vote at astonishing rates.
The Office of Special Council (OSC), which had been established by the Wisconsin State Assembly to investigate election irregularities, learned of strange occurrences at in several Wisconsin nursing homes. The nursing home residents were voting at amazing rates, even when incapacitated by dementia. Ninety-one homes were investigated by the OSC, and it was determined that they had voting rates of between 95 and 100 percent. In 66 of the 91 nursing homes, the rate was 100 percent. Even younger and healthier people don’t vote at such rates, and our national average is less than 70 percent. Fraud is the likely explanation.