#votingrightsact — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #votingrightsact, aggregated by home.social.
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It Has become Unbearable
#IdiotInChief #orangeDecibyte #VPTrump & its enablers, #PresidentVought, #PresidentThiel, #PresidentBezos, #PresidentMusk, and #PresidentMiller have destroyed a young* #democracy.
#Resist to #saveDemocracy!
#Amphifa: #ViveLaFrogistance!
#ALText
*since 1965: #VotingRightsAct
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:omyr27fmzj3phbagch4sqyub/post/3mtvqfub6r22o -
The evil, vain, greedy, deceitful #orangeDecibyte #VPTrump lashes out at the SCOTUS. It and its enablers, #PresidentThiel #PresidentVought, #PresidentMiller, #PresidentBezos, and #PresidentMusk have destroyed a young* nearly #democracy (no #gerrymandering in a true one). *1965 #VotingRightsAct -2025
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xjc7mkotpenvhh6ffewkdpyn/post/3mljs7r4ins2c -
TY, @[email protected]! He's not the only one. The evil, vain, greedy, deceitful #orangeDecibyte that destroyed a young* diet* #democracy needs anti-propaganda tools and follow-the-money-penalties. *1965-2025, #VotingRightsAct but #gerrymandering #Boycott the men's #FIFAWorldcup & #OlympicGames!
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pjiafkey2cokiupsxpswqlk7/post/3ml7ypr3rzk2j -
ICYMI Excellent interview about the Voting Rights Act and where it now stands with Sherrill Ifill and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.
Civil rights lawyer and founding director of Howard Law School's 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy, Sherrilyn Ifill, sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
They talk about how the reinstatement for purposeful discrimination overturned the court’s own precedent, how the Voting Rights Act protects the voting strength of minorities and their candidates of choice, and the dangerous potential for Trump and Republicans to redistrict using this precedent in an effort to turn seats in the House.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCse1FFEKLM
#Voting #VotingRights #VotingRightsAct #SherillIfill #JonSteward #TheDailyShow #DailyShow #Louisiana #SupremeCourt
cc: @heidilifeldman
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From VSN Newsroom 92% of Black Women #duet #blackwomen #vote #matriarchy #women #votingrightsact #patriarchy #vote
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WE_csY3q0uo
#news #left #resist #resistance #vsn #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia
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From VSN Newsroom 92% of Black Women #duet #blackwomen #vote #matriarchy #women #votingrightsact #patriarchy #vote
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WE_csY3q0uo
#news #left #resist #resistance #vsn #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia
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From VSN Newsroom 92% of Black Women #duet #blackwomen #vote #matriarchy #women #votingrightsact #patriarchy #vote
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WE_csY3q0uo
#news #left #resist #resistance #vsn #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia
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From VSN Newsroom 92% of Black Women #duet #blackwomen #vote #matriarchy #women #votingrightsact #patriarchy #vote
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WE_csY3q0uo
#news #left #resist #resistance #vsn #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia
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From VSN Newsroom 92% of Black Women #duet #blackwomen #vote #matriarchy #women #votingrightsact #patriarchy #vote
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WE_csY3q0uo
#news #left #resist #resistance #vsn #DiverseSpectrumOfTheLeft #SupportIndependentMedia
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The #SCOTUS decision on the #VotingRightsAct is exactly what #LeonardLeo and the #FederalistSociety paid for in #ChiefJustice #JohnRoberts
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The #SCOTUS decision on the #VotingRightsAct is exactly what #LeonardLeo and the #FederalistSociety paid for in #ChiefJustice #JohnRoberts
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#SCOTUS kills #VotingRights
The Supreme Court’s decision to upend a key provision of the #VotingRightsAct [#VRA] has plunged the nation into a dizzying new era of partisan conflict, most likely ushering in a forever #redistricting war that could produce fewer competitive seats in #Congress & further #polarize #US politics.
#law #ElectionLaw #CivilRights #democracy #RepresentationMatters #authoritarianism #illiberalism #PartisanCourt #ActivistCourt
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/us/politics/supreme-courts-voting-rights-gerrymandering.html?unlocked_article_code=1.fFA.NAaT.LyRxcoyihmGB&smid=nytcore-ios-share -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@QasimRashid/116489299784659411
Today the Roberts Court spits on graves of hundreds of thousands who died for the idea that black people are people.
The Civil War really was a thing.
But Uncle #ClarenceThomas won't be happy until he can't vote.
#JohnRoberts #RobertsCourt #SCOTUS #crowned #King #OurPutin #VotingRightsAct #VRA #GOP #KKK #DEI #fascist #USA #Constitution #Alito #Kavanaugh #ComeyBarrett #Gorsuch #SupremeCourt #voting #civil #rights -
Samuel Alito justified a Supreme Court ruling that threatens majority-Black voting districts
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/scotus-further-guts-voting-rights
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TY, @[email protected]! The evil, vain , greedy #orangeDecibyte and its enablers shouldn't be allowed to host men's #FIFAWorldcup and #OlympicGames. They've destroyed the young US near #democracy (1965 #VotingRightsAct - 2025 In a democracy, there's no #gerrymandering). #Boycott and #resist
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t6ubj2wlhc34awzcymh3qpur/post/3mj3qq3wr622n -
Letters from an American – August 5, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson
Letters from an American, August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)
By Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 05, 2025
Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”
In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.
All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.
With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.
In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.
The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.
Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.
Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.
During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.
Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-5-2025-tuesday
August 5, 2025 (Tuesday) by Heather Cox Richardson
#2025 #America #CivilWar #DonaldTrump #Education #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #LyndonBJohnson #Politics #PresidentJohnson #Resistance #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #VotingRightsAct
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What Is A #PollTax? Definition and Examples
By Robert Longley, July 27, 2022
Excerpt: "In the United States, the origin of the poll tax—and the controversy surrounding it—is associated with the agrarian unrest of the 1880s and 1890s, which culminated in the rise of the Populist Party in the Western and the Southern states. The Populists, representing low-income farmers, gave Democrats in these areas the only serious competition that they had experienced since the end of Reconstruction. The competition led both parties to see the need to attract Black citizens back into politics and to compete for their vote. As the Democrats defeated the Populists, they amended their state constitutions or drafted new ones to include various discriminatory disfranchising devices. When the payment of the poll tax was made a prerequisite to voting, impoverished #BlackPeople and often #PoorWhitePeople, unable to afford the tax, were denied the #RightToVote.
"During the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the United States, the former states of the Confederacy repurposed the poll tax explicitly to prevent formerly enslaved #BlackAmericans from voting. Although the #14thAmendment and #15thAmendment [s] gave Black men full #citizenship and #VotingRights, the power to determine what constituted a qualified voter was left to the states. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, #SouthernStates quickly exploited this legal loophole. At its 1890 constitutional convention, Mississippi imposed a $2.00 poll tax and early registration as a requirement for voting. This had catastrophic results for the Black electorate. Whereas approximately 87,000 Black citizens registered to vote in 1869, representing almost 97% of the eligible voting-age population, fewer than 9,000 of them registered to vote after the state’s new constitution took effect in 1892.
"Between 1890 and 1902, all eleven former #Confederate states imposed some form of a poll tax to deter Black Americans from voting. The tax, which ranged from $1 to $2, was prohibitively expensive for most Black sharecroppers, who earned their wages in crops, not currency. Beyond the cost, voter registration and tax payment offices were usually located in public spaces designed to intimidate potential voters, like courthouses and police stations.
"The southern states also enacted #JimCrowLaws intended to reinforce #RacialSegregation and restrict Black voting rights. Along with the poll tax, most of these states also imposed literacy tests, which required potential voters to read and interpret in writing sections of the state constitution. So-called 'grandfather clauses' allowed a person to vote without paying the poll tax or passing the literacy test if their father or grandfather had voted before the abolition of slavery in 1865; a stipulation that automatically precluded all formerly enslaved persons. Together, the grandfather clause and the literacy tests effectively restored voting rights to poorer White voters who could not pay the poll tax, while further suppressing the Black vote.
"Poll taxes of varying stipulations lingered in Southern states well into the 20th century. While some states abolished the tax in the years after World War I, others retained it. Ratified in 1964, the #24thAmendment to the #USConstitution declared the tax unconstitutional in federal elections.
"Specifically, the 24th Amendment states:
'The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.'
"President Lyndon B. Johnson called the amendment a 'triumph of liberty over restriction.' 'It is a verification of people's rights, which are rooted so deeply in the mainstream of this nation's history,' he said.
"The #VotingRightsAct of 1965 created significant changes in the voting status of Black Americans throughout the South. The law prohibited the states from using literacy tests and other methods of excluding Black Americans from voting. Before this, only an estimated twenty-three percent of voting-age Black citizens were registered nationally, but by 1969 the number had jumped to sixty-one percent.
"In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court went beyond the Twenty-fourth Amendment by ruling in the case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, states could not levy a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in state and local elections. In two months in the spring of 1966, federal courts declared poll tax laws unconstitutional in the last four states that still had them, starting with Texas on February 9. Similar decisions soon followed in Alabama and Virginia. Mississippi's $2.00 poll tax (about $18 today) was the last to fall, declared unconstitutional on April 8, 1966."
https://www.thoughtco.com/poll-tax-definition-and-examples-5443130
#VoterDisenfranchisement #USPol #USHistory #TwentyFourthAmendment #FourteenthAmendment #FifteenthAmendment #VoterRights #LiteracyTests #USElections #VoterSuppression #BlackAmericans -
This is the #DisintegrationChecklist. #TheChecklist of what we can expect to lose in the next four years. That makes it a tool for gauging the progress of loss. 43 items. A grim countdown score in the form of a simple number: how many are still left? That is the #DisintegrationScore. 43... for now.
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from https://absurdistwords.bsky.social:#ThingsThatWillDisappearInTheNextFourYears (A non-exhaustive list)
#AbortionRights
#Contraception
#NoFaultDivorce
#ViolenceAgainstWomenAct (#VAWA)
#CivilRightsAct
#VotingRightsAct
#FirstAmendment Protections
#BirthrightCitizenship
#NaturalizationProtection
#EnvironmentalProtection
#ConsumerProtection
#FraudProtection
#PoliceBrutality #ConsentDecrees
#HabeasCorpus
Three #CoEqualBranchesOfGovernment
#GenderAffirmingCare
#HormoneReplacement
#InVitroFertilization
#SameSexMarriage
#InterracialMarriage
#AntiDiscrimination Laws
#WorkerSafety Laws
#CollectiveBargaining
#AffordableCareAct (#ACA)
#PrisonReform
#AmericansWithDisabilitiesAct (#ADA)
#RightToPrivacy
#SeparationOfChurchAndState
#ForeignAid Programs
#PovertyPrograms
#PublicRadio & #PublicTelevision
#SexualFreedom
#AntiSegregation Laws
#VaccineMandates
#PublicSchool System
#PublicLibrary System
#StareDecisis
#ChildLabor Laws
#Antitrust Laws
#LegalCannabis
#Pornography
#SexWorker Protections
#InternetFreedom
_________________________Keeping track of this #DisintegrationChecklist, & the
#DisintegrationScore, is not a silly thing. I am not trying to #gamify the #apocalypse. It is a concrete measure, and if it is widely shared, it will make apparent even to the distracted the accelerating loss. A tool for those capable of caring.https://bsky.app/profile/absurdistwords.bsky.social/post/3lb5wwj23v22u
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Four months after Humble ISD trustees narrowly rejected a proposal to consider adopting single-member voting districts, to ensure equitable representation on the school board, the Houston-area district has been sued under the Voting Rights Act.
#CivilRights #Court #Education #EducationNews #Local #News #Schools #Voting #BrewerStorefront #HispanicHoustonVoters #HumbleISD #HumbleISDSchoolBoard #VotingRightsAct #VotingRightsLawsuit
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Angleton ISD and Humble ISD are among the Texas school districts that have been accused of violating the Voting Rights Act over the makeup of their governing bodies and how their leadership is elected.
#CivilRights #Court #Education #EducationNews #Elections #Local #News #Politics #Schools #Texas #Voting #AngletonISD #BrewerStorefront #HumbleISD #LULAC #SchoolBoardElections #VotingRightsAct
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How the #NativeAmerican Vote Continues to be Suppressed
by Patty Ferguson-Bohnee
February, 2020"The right to vote has been an uphill battle for #NativeAmericans. The #VotingRightsAct of 1965 helped to secure and protect that right for many Native Americans and #AlaskaNatives. With the Voting Rights Act, voter participation among Native Americans increased. However, the Supreme Court invalidated the Section 5 preclearance formula in 2013 (Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)), removing one of the most powerful tools to ensure equal access to the ballot, including Alaska and Arizona, and two jurisdictions in South Dakota with significant Native American and Alaska Native populations. Since the Shelby County decision, efforts to suppress the vote have increased. For Native Americans, these voter suppression efforts can and do have devastating impacts.
"Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, many Native Americans living on reservations continued to be excluded from the democratic process. In 1948, Native Americans in #NewMexico and #Arizona successfully litigated their right to vote. #Utah and #NorthDakota became the last states to afford on-reservation Native Americans the right to vote in 1957 and 1958, respectively. When the right to vote was finally secured, voter suppression laws kept Native Americans from voting and seeking elected office. In Arizona, for example, Native Americans could not fully participate in voting until 1970 when the Supreme Court upheld the ban against using literacy tests (Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970)). Today, the right to vote continues to be challenged through the passage of new laws and practices that either fail to consider, disregard, or intentionally target Native American voters.
"In order to understand the challenges faced by Native American voters, one must recognize the vast differences in experiences, opportunities, and realities facing on-reservation voters as compared to off-reservation voters.
"I will never forget the #Navajo grandmother who spoke only Navajo and could not vote after Arizona passed its voter ID law in 2004. She tried several times to obtain an Arizona ID on her own but was denied because she was born at home in a hogan, and the boarding schools changed her Navajo name to English. She lived in a modest home on the Navajo Reservation without electricity and running water, and lived a traditional lifestyle taking care of her sheep. She was embarrassed and devastated when she was turned away from the polls for not having an ID. Working with her, a team from the Indian Legal Clinic traveled five hours to meet her at multiple agency offices to obtain her delayed birth certificate; we then went to two separate Motor Vehicle Division Offices. The first one did not issue same-day photo IDs, and the other initially denied her request. The office rejected her delayed Navajo birth certificate, until I was able to intervene and demonstrate to them that it was an acceptable document. The system failed to consider her reality as a Navajo woman and failed to value her as a voter. Fortunately, she was persistent in exercising her right to vote, but not all voters are, nor should they have to be.
"This example helps explain why voting can be difficulty for Native American voters. Turnout for Native Americans is the lowest in the country, as compared to other groups. While a number of issues contribute to the low voter turnout, a study conducted by the Native American Voting Rights Coalition found that low levels of trust in government, lack of information on how and where to register and to vote, long travel distances to register or to vote, low levels of access to the internet, hostility toward Native Americans, and intimidation are obstacles. Isolating conditions such as language barriers, socioeconomic disparities, lack of access to transportation, lack of residential #addresses, lack of access to #mail, and the digital divide limit Native American political participation. Changes to voting processes further frustrate the ability of Native Americans to vote."
