Voter ID horror story: NC poll workers forced brown-skinned couple to take a ‘spelling test’
Rudy Ravindra, a resident of Wilmington, penned an op-ed piece in the Raleigh News & Observer about his experience when he went to cast his ballot during the early voting period.
“I gave my driver’s license to a poll worker, HW. He kept it face down and ordered me to spell my name,” Ravindra explained. “Although I go by Rudy, my legal name is Rudravajhala. In order to save time, I requested HW look at my ID. He barked, ‘You gotta spell it!’ So I took a deep breath and began. ‘R-U-D-‘”
During the encounter itself, there followed a scene reminiscent of an old literacy test — administered by somebody who might’ve had their own problems at passing it. Ravindra described it as a “spelling test.”
Snip
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/voter-id-horror-story-nc-poll-workers-forced-brown-skinned-couple-to-take-a-spelling-test/
= new reply since forum marked as read
But Pukes, Baggers, Haters, etc. will hail him as some kind of hero.
This horror reflects how deteriorated this country has become. It has to change.
1965 Louisiana Literacy Test (Slate News)
'The Impossible Literacy Test, Louisiana, 1965', Slate, 2013.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html
that shit was insane,; I had no idea it was that bad. 25 questions each confusingly worded, 10 minutes to do it, 1 wrong and you fail.
was practicing law in Arizona in the 1960s he stood outside polls on election day to intimidate Hispanic voters. In the 1960s in Orange Co., CA, 'rent a cops' dressed in uniforms similar to Immigration officers were stationed outside polling places to scare Hispanics a DU poster commented recently.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed by President Johnson was a landmark legislative achievement for civil rights. But in 2013, the conservative Roberts court gutted the key clause of the 1965 VRA which called for strict oversight of voting in states with a history of racial discrimination-- ostensibly because the US 'now had a black president.'
The 2013 Supreme Court decision also enabled states to quickly enact new voting restriction rules from Wisconsin to North Carolina, such as costly photo IDs which require birth certificates (extra fees, like 'poll taxes'), relocation of established polling places to smaller, difficult to find and park places to confuse voters and other obstruction measures. Most of the newer rules impact people who are city dwellers, lower income, elders, students and minorities.~
________________
- UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, *Federal Voting Rights Laws- (symbols *>, capitalization by this writer)
https://www.justice.gov/crt/history-federal-voting-rights-laws
*THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965*
The 1965 Enactment
By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual.
*The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in SELMA, ALABAMA, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.
>Congress determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment. The legislative hearings showed that the Department of Justice's efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices by litigation on a case-by-case basis had been unsuccessful in opening up the registration process; as soon as one discriminatory practice or procedure was proven to be unconstitutional and enjoined, a new one would be substituted in its place and litigation would have to commence anew.
President Johnson signed the resulting legislation into law on August 6, 1965. Section 2 of the Act, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the *LITERACY TESTS on a nationwide basis.
-> Among its other provisions, the Act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for *DISCRIMINATION to be the greatest. Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect.
In addition, the Attorney General could designate a county covered by these special provisions for the appointment of a federal examiner to review the qualifications of persons who wanted to register to vote. Further, in those counties where a federal examiner was serving, the Attorney General could request that federal observers monitor activities within the county's polling place.
The Voting Rights Act had not included a provision prohibiting *POLL TAXES, but had directed the Attorney General to challenge its use. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), the Supreme Court held Virginia's poll tax to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Between 1965 and 1969 the Supreme Court also issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices that required Section 5 review. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:
Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966).
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, FREEING NINE STATES, MOSTLY IN THE SOUTH, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.
The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and the nation’s progress in rooting out RACIAL DISCRIMINATION in voting. At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.
“OUR COUNTRY HAS CHANGED,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
>The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval. Changes in voting procedures in the places that had been covered by the law, including ones concerning restrictions on early voting, will now be subject only to after-the-fact litigation.
President Obama, whose election as the nation’s first black president was cited by critics of the law as evidence that it was no longer needed, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?_r=0
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/06/28/1960s-Voting-Literacy-Test/
*"The Impossible Literacy Test in Louisiana, 1965, Voting Rights and the Supreme Court", Slate, 2013.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.htm
...the poll worker at my precinct took my license and then made me state my street address, city and zip. She apologized for having to ask. Had I been of minority descent, she may not have been as cordial, even in my ultra polite county. It stinks and we're embarrassed. My condolences to Rudravajhala. The majority of North Carolinians do not approve of what the morons in Raleigh have been up to. But they need to show up at the damn polls even in off year elections and put and end to this shit. 
No. 5. College students were rejected by almost 5%. They couldn't use their driver license as ID if it was out if state or if it was their parent's home address instead of their current one while at school
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027702747
How outrageous what the WWII Veteran of Iwo Jima recently experienced in Wisconsin under the state's new voter suppression laws. Elderly people who live in nursing homes or their own homes but don't drive or have a photo ID, now must obtain birth certificates and Non Driver IDs in states like Wisconsin because of new rules although they never needed special IDs to vote in the past.
Several years ago a man in Wisconsin who always drives a bus to take seniors to vote on election day called a radio program saying the people would have to go through a lot of effort to obtain new IDs in time for the upcoming election. People don't always know that new voter restriction laws have been put in place, and what's going on locally and nationally until they find out when they go to vote, unfortunately.
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"A 90-YEAR-OLD IWO JIMA VETERAN COULDN'T VOTE IN SCOTT WALKER'S WISCONSIN", This Should Be A Message to the DNC. Will Debbie Wasserman Schultz Hear It? By Charles Pierce, Esquire, Feb. 25, 2016.
Life's tough and getting tougher out in that Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, where goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker remains the managing director. Now, it seems casting your ballot in a state election has become harder than surviving the slog up Mount Suribachi was.
In her letter, Bradley said her uncle had fought at IWO JIMA, the bloody World War II battle that was immortalized in a photo of the U.S. flag being raised on the tiny Pacific island. Tuesday marked the 71st anniversary of the 1945 flag raising. Bradley's uncle, Leo Olson of Reedsburg, tried to use his VETERANS ID CARD to vote in last week's primary for a seat on the state Supreme Court, but that form of identification can't be used under the state's voter ID law. Olson does not have a driver's license. That could soon change because of legislation the state Senate is to take up next month. Even if approved, it may not be in place for the April 5 election, when voters will decide the state Supreme Court race and cast ballots in the presidential primaries.
"He considers voting part of his patriotic duty," Bradley wrote to Walker.
"Yet, last week this proud patriot of 90 years of age was embarrassed and confused when he went to the polls and was denied his right to vote. Then he presented his veterans administration card with his picture on it, he was told that the card was not listed as 'acceptable' proof of his identity. He responded: "YOU MEAN VETERANS CAN'T VOTE?'"
I guarantee you that there are hundreds of examples of things like this out there. VETERANS. GRANDPARENTS. HONOR STUDENTS. COPS. NURSES. Each one of them could be used to shame the people who are writing and passing VOTER-SUPPRESSION LAWS ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES. These examples could provide an endless stream of campaign commercials that would have the advantage of actually being true. However, this would require competent, forward-thinking leadership at the DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE which is, at the moment, being run by someone whose primary concentration apparently is ensuring herself good seats at the 2017 inauguration.http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42451/scott-walker-voter-id-veteran/
