A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote

Note: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm:

> [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.]

Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf

This is super interesting. The Slate author who originally posted the Tangipahoa test followed up, with a bunch of extra information, and a pointer to a '63 Louisiana District Court case ruling the constitutional interpretation test you linked to unconstitutional:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161105050044/http://www.laed.u...

It's interesting that the Slate and crmvet pieces have updates about the search for authenticity, but this piece published today doesn't mention it.

It's been cited in other scholarly work that cites crmvet, so it's not surprising that, if it's not authentically a Louisiana test, it'll take awhile to clean up in the literature.

The original Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-t...

The follow-up, in which the author chronicles their (unsuccessful) search for an original: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/louisiana-literacy-....

The follow-up explicitly notes that the word-processed version shown in the original article is a modern update; a typewritten version that is supposedly closer to the original is shown at the bottom of that article (and available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160615084237/http://msmcdushis...), although the provenance of this version is also unclear ("McDonald reports that she received the test, along with another literacy test from Alabama, from a fellow teacher, who had been using them in the classroom for years but didn’t remember where they came from.")

Right, and you'd assume that if it was widely delivered in Louisiana, there'd be contemporaneous records; what that test is doing is pretty obvious.

It may be from after 1942 and the "correct" answer is simply wrong.

I think it's surprising because the piece is new and it links to the Slate and crmvet articles.

> That literacy test seems reasonable

Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.

It's definitely not reasonable. You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges. There are lots of likely-disqualifiers mixed in with the gimmes like "Who is the first president?".

Right, but they're rehashing coverage they had of this exact test 10 years ago.

Why would you assume that?

Because the test we're talking about is comically unfair, and people were complaining in the press about multiple-choice constitutional knowledge tests that were only subtly unfair.

This one seems deliberately difficult to answer correctly, even with the requisite civics knowledge:

> The President of the Senate gets his office

> a. by election by the people.

> b. by election by the Senate.

> c. by appointment by the President.

The Vice President is the President of the Senate, but the duties are typically exercised (save the tie-breaking vote) by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, a Senator chosen by whichever party currently has a majority. It seems both a. and b. could be considered correct.

Agreed. This test is not reasonable.

Even "who is the first president" knowledge shouldn't be a bar to voting. Do you think they offered this literacy test in the native languages of all taking it? Do you think all people in the US had the opportunity to learn, in their language, the history of the country?

At the time there were systemic barriers to education that meant that many folk were probably not even taught who the first president was. Let alone how old you have to be to be president.

I'd argue even C could be seen as correct. The president chooses his running mate, after all.

C is also literally what happens if a new VP is needed for any reason (needs to get confirmed by Congress though).

I'd say C is the only correct answer actually. Neither the President nor his running mate are elected by the people; they're elected by the Electoral College. And the question isn't about the President Pro Tempore of the Senate.

I think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.

There is an actual SCOTUS case on these tests, confirming that they indeed actually exited, see Louisiana vs. U.S. (1965).

Also this sample test (https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=940581&p=6830148) is from the Law Library of Louisiana, aka, the State Bar of Louisiana. Are you accusing the State Bar of Louisiana and the Louisiana Supreme Court of lying about the history of their state?

And this article (https://www.nola.com/news/politics/civil-rights-victory-50-y...) by NOLA actually goes through the history of the tests, citing contemporaneous reporting of the tests over several decades, though you would probably need physical access to the microfiche archives to confirm them yourself.

Unless you are suggesting that SCOTUS, SCLA, and the biggest newspaper in Louisiana are all conspiring together to make up these tests, the historical record for these tests existing is very well established.

In many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times.

What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?

It's an additional step that must be completed well ahead of election day, making voting a two-step process. It shouldn't be necessary: you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.

The question is whether the test in the article is a real example of a literacy test, not whether literacy tests existed.

And indeed, the way it's done somewhere else on this planet is you show up, vote, get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll and vote a second time, and that's all there is to that.

You think it is unlikely that a famously problematic-in-terms-of-race state issued a problematic-in-terms-of-race literacy test?

Or are that just the typical high standards of proof that coincidentally pop up whenever rightwing opinions receives legitimate criticism? Standards that they themselves never even remotely hold themselves to ("my sisters aunts dog heard on facebook")?

In places with more modern technology, instead of relying on ink on thumbs, we can just have a computerized system informing all the voting precincts that John Doe has now voted at Precinct X, perhaps with a face photo in case someone alleges fraud.

No, they don't think that. The previous commenter simply misread my comment.

> you can determine on election day whether someone's already voted or not before they cast a vote.

Can you suggest a specific mechanism to do it that would be transparent to the public?

I don't know about the US specifics but in Russia people voting multiple times was the main strategy of fraud in 2010s (that is before they gave up all the pretence). Before this scheme came into being, the system of isolated voting points where every action was observable and verifiable based solely on the local context had worked reasonably well, to the displeasure of authorities.

That requires some preparation. Example: in Italy the state knows where everybody live (this is self reported but it could be inferred in many ways) and, more importantly for this case, where everybody has residence (that might not be the correct English word, sorry.)

I could have residence in a city because I was born there but I could live in another one because for one year I have to work in that other city. But I don't sell my home, terminate contracts with utilities etc, also because maybe I go back home once or twice per month to visit friends and parents. Ok, so when I have to vote I do it in my city of residence, in a given place and not in any other one, and I have a card that I have to present together with my photo id. They have a register with the voters that are expected to vote there and they check my name on the list, stamp my card, give me the ballot.

Note that this is a process that starts when one is born and keeps going through all the life of a person. It's quite an effort but it makes participating to elections very low effort for a voter. If we had to register to vote... Who would vote, only very interested people. It's amazing that so many people vote in the USA given the process.

Well good luck voting-out the government that controls that system.

I think that's the point of these questions, to have no clear answer.

So a presidential candidate picks a vice president running mate. Voters vote for the pair. The electoral college then, usually but not always, cast votes matching the voters.

So who decided? Technically the electoral college. Who were guided by the voters. Who voted for someone the president picked.

The problem isn't necessarily voter registration per se, but how easy or hard you make it. Giving politicians or bureaucrats the power to disenfranchise voters by requiring jumping through seemingly arbitrary hoops or based on vague rules will always lead to abuse.

In many countries if you are a citizen (or permanent resident, depending on the election), old enough, and registered as living in the country you are automatically registered to vote. No need to do anything, your form shows up in the mail before every election. The only times you might have to do something is if you've very recently moved to a different part of the country or if you live abroad.

You should apply a large permanent mark to people that already voted. It must last one day or so. But that could infringe the right of not to vote, unless voting is mandatory. Or make impossible to vote twice because everybody is tied to exactly one anonymous ballot. See my reply to parent, about the voting system in Italy. However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote. In my country they'll have to get the photo id number of those people but it's not difficult to get if they have access to official data.

The answer key is included, and the correct answer according to the test is indeed "the people".

The key issue and the whole purpose of that question is that also both a. and b. could be considered wrong.

If the person answers A, then the grader can state that this is correct if they like them, or assert that instead B is correct if they don't, so that the test can always provide the desired outcome.

Some time ago every election or referendum simply put a stamp in the passport when voting, but that was before plastic ID cards. Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers; this also reports your ID for the invalidation of any pre-election votes (e.g. mail-in ballots) elsewhere.

Do you really think Black people would have been covered fairly in the press in the 1960's?

In the Netherlands at least, you just get a voting card sent to you by mail, and you have to hand that in to vote. Since you just have a single card, you can only vote once.

So I can vote in these places when I am on vacation there? Of course just once.

This is what is done in essentially all of the Western world (except USA and the UK) and it works just fine with free and fair elections and peaceful transfers of power.

Merely requiring photo ID is controversial in the US (and not done in MA where I vote).

Additionally having a continually up to date registry of persons would definitely not fly here.

As I understand it the US doesn't have a giant federal government database that tracks everyone who is eligible to vote and their current postal adress.

Millions of voting age Americans do not have a non expired photo ID.

Few people know that the first president was Peyton Randolph.

since what that test was doing was trying to illegally deprive black people of their right to vote I'd think they'd try to keep it as hidden as possible, which is what I would recommend one do when breaking the law.

How hidden can you keep a test that many thousands of voters take?

Nonsense, of course they were in some press.

There were many white Americans fighting for equality for all. Heck, look at the recent BLM movement, the woke discussions, #metoo and more.

All of these things were possible because of the 60s, because of white legislators, white judges, white supreme court judges, pushing for change, enacting change, creating the US today which, while imperfect, is quite supportive of equality, both legally and culturally.

So yes, there was all sorts of main stream media pushing for equality.

Heck, the first interracial kiss on US primetime was in the 60s on Star Trek ToS.

Not John Hanson?

We just had an election in BC, Canada, and the way it worked here is that everyone has a "home" polling location which is responsible for ensuring that their vote is counted once and only once.

If the distributed system is not partitioned, you can show up to vote anywhere and they tell your home precinct that you've voted; then during vote counting the precinct where you voted tells your home precinct "add the following to your vote totals".

If the system is partitioned -- either from network outages or remote polling locations or mail-in ballots -- then your ballot goes into an envelope and is physically sent to your home precinct in the week following the election, to be verified and included in the count.

Voter registration is reasonable, but it should be possible to register on Election Day, at a polling location, and it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

> Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote.

Well, open borders for one.

I wonder how that compares to Italians.

You used to need a passport to vote? 42-47% of Americans have passports currently. In 1990, only 5% of Americans had passports.

Going from memory:

In Italy you're meant to always carry a valid, officially accepted form of ID (and as far as I know, only ID card and Password fully qualify, but driving or nautical licenses, gun permits, and some forms of railway employee ID are also generally accepted as they're ultimately made by the government) and it's a crime (with up 2 months in jail, though it's usually just a fine) to refuse to show it upon request to on-duty "public security officials" (Italy has a bunch of entities in addition to the normal police) and in a few other rare categories (a bus or train inspector has the power to demand your ID if you're travelling without a ticket and need to be fined).

If you don't actually refuse, but you explain you just forgot your ID at home, you can still provide your details verbally and are usually allowed to go, and "invited" to show your ID within XX days at any police post. But if you were driving a car, there will be a small fine anyway.

If the officer has any suspicion you lied, or that your ID is fake, you can be taken to a police station for identification.

how do you know how many people took the test? They don't need to use the super-secret fallback test to keep every black person from voting, the test was if all the other methods to keep them from voting didn't work, and then you didn't necessarily use all the test, you used some of the test, just enough to say they failed, and then what? Do you register the test somewhere?

Since the literacy test was used at the discretion of the authorities in charge of the vote they could choose who to give it to based on how likely they were to get away with using it.

I mean if you know the black people in your district will vote for a particular party you probably don't actually want to keep the black people in your district from voting, you want that party not to win because otherwise the party might help the black people living in your district.

If there are 1800 black people and 1100 white people that can vote in your district, then maybe you only need to keep 900 people from voting to be safe.

So then you announce you will be checking outstanding warrants at the polls, 600 people don't show up. You only need to keep 300 people from voting! So you start giving literacy tests to black voters but letting the white voters through - how many black people you think you will actually need to give that literacy test to before the rest of them wise up that you aren't going to be letting them vote?

I'd say maybe 20.

Now how many of them going to get copies of that test to do something about? What if you don't want to give them a copy of the test? How they going to get that copy of the test?

I'm sorry but I think this kind of thing would be pretty under-documented, just like most crime. I'm agreeing you can't keep it thoroughly hidden but hidden enough that it is difficult to say with any specificity this was the actual test used in that district on that day to fail these people.

on edit: removed something that was probably a bit rude, sorry, was going through some problems with kid at the moment and frustration transferred to my writing.

This is how it works in most EU countries afaik (at least where I live).

You're automatically registered essentially. You only need to show up with the form/ballet you were sent and your ID. Your vote is anonymous, just registered that you voted.

Personally I like the Aussie way even more, which is compulsory.

I feel this is necessary in a democracy. Voting needs to be easy, swift and free for that to work though.

I like the abstract idea of literacy tests but then I also think some questions in this particular literacy test is unnecessarily tricky. And some could be considered historical trivia.

The commerce question is supposed to be answered by reading the constitution by itself, not by reading SCOTUS opinions. So this is different from actual constitutional scholars. That makes this question unsuitable for literacy tests.

At a minimum: I think people should be given ample time to complete a literacy test, at a date and time chosen by the test taker, and also have multiple attempts available. And for the content of the test, they should have actual elementary school students attempt it to make sure it isn't too difficult.

Question 5 is also quite (intentionally) ambiguous:

> The Constitution of the United States places the final authority in our Nation in the hands of...

> a. the national courts.

> b. the States.

> c. the people.

The answer key says c. is correct, but I think I would have answered a. You could also argue the States is correct, since they have the authority to amend the Constitution. The very concept of "final authority" is sort of antithetical to the Constitution.

> I certainly hope you're not so naive

There is absolutely no need to take this tone, especially seeing as the person you are replying to is clearly in good faith.

And if there is a tie in the electoral college, then the senate elects the Vice President. I would argue that A, which is what the answer key says is correct, is the least correct of these three incorrect answers.

Unless you get someone else's card and forge their signature on the back side, which is a permission form indicating that you can vote on their behalf; I don't believe there's enough checks and balances in place for this voting-on-behalf-of system, but then again I don't know what checks and balances there are.

Some examples of racism were documented in some progressive outlets, therefore all examples of racism would have made it into the public record?

Maybe there was concern, when progressives were fighting this sort of thing, that if they picked the most unbelievable example, the naive public (those not familiar with the residents of a typical Klan-era backwater Louisiana parish) would question its veracity… as we see today…

Imagine you were going to forge a such a test? I don’t think I could make up something this ridiculous if I tried. I’d have to be practiced in generating trick questions, and motivated by malice to come close. Realistically, I’d give up and pick one of the readily-available real examples of poll tests to use.

If there is a credible threat of retaliation (violence, employment, housing) for even trying to vote, then this is very effective. Why take a big risk if you won’t get to vote anyway? This way you don’t actually have to give the test very often, everyone quickly figures out the “rules” and falls into line.

The example literacy test you link to is dramatically more level headed than the one in the article. It's what you would expect a fifth grade level assessment to be.

In fact the site you link to even calls out the test mention in the article, stating that it seems it was used in one parish for one summer.

> get your thumb inked so you can't go to another poll

This can't possibly be a serious solution. A quart of acetone costs $2.

....ahem, obviously I meant Passport... not Password...

True, the guard rails there are that you can only do that for at most 2 people, limiting the impact of potential fraud there.

The Political Party chooses the vice presidential candidate for its Elector.

Voters vote for an Elector, not a President/Vice President.

An Elector could pledge a different vice presidential candidate, and might get votes.

The vast majority of voters do not actually know truly how President and Vice President are elected

There's also a few typographical issues I noticed that might have been an issue for uneducated folk. For instance, in one question, government is written as "governm ent" What's a government ENT?

That's kind of a weird paradox in general and it's how we lose a lot of information. Things that were ubiquitous didn't necessarily become recorded. Because it's just the way things were.

It requires you to take time to register, either out of your days beforehand to be registered day of; or time out of your day to register to vote at the polling place day-of. This is on top of having to drive potentially a ways to get to the polling place, only to be told you cannot vote because you're unregistered.

It should be a national holiday, or you should be able to vote online. Session IDs would go a long way in preventing voter fraud, I think.

A literacy test in which language?

Agreed, from my limited web research the actual existence of use of this document has been questioned for many years. This is not a new topic, or a new artifact. I've found references to this verbiage going back as far as the 1960's.

Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time.

Speaking to many of the outraged commenters, Do you think that the example test is a reasonable analog of any state's voting process currently in use? If not, do you think an analog of this test could be enacted legally under current legal statutes? If so, what additional changes would you propose to supplement current statutes?

How does this mechanism prevent one person voting multiple times in different locations?

The test comes with an answer key. See the second half of https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf.

> Racism and/or vote fixing via the methodology claimed in this article would be a serious and despicable thing, however, as far as I'm aware, we are protected from this now and have been for a long time.

The protection took a major hit in 2013, when the US Supreme court made a 5-4 decision in Shelby vs. Holder [0], permitting some areas to (re-)start a strategy of imposing unconstitutional and discriminatory laws just before an election, with local authorities knowing that any court-case voiding their law can't arrive in time to matter. Then they just enact the same kind of discriminatory law before the next major election, over and over, with no real punishment.

While state legislatures aren't currently choosing to enact things quite as blatant as before, the same exploit makes it possible.

[0] https://www.naacpldf.org/shelby-county-v-holder-impact/

Quick: how is the President of the Senate selected?

It's a trick question. It's the Vice President, who is elected by the people (a)... but not for the role of president of the senate. But it could also be the President pro tempoire, who is elected by the senate (b).

Also the first question presupposes we all go to church. What about synagogues or temples?

Question #5 is entirely discretionary depending on the context of what power you are discussing.

And that's the point: these literacy tests were filled with questions like these that let the test giver choose the right answer based on whether they wanted the test taker to pass.

> How hidden can you keep a test that many thousands of voters take?

After its taken, and presuming active measures were taken to prevent distribution other than for people taking it who would then return it, pretty easily. Paper is biodegradable, burns easily, can be shredded (and recycled into new paper), etc.

The Vice President is elected by the Electoral College, not the people, and the President Pro Tem of the Senate is not the President of the Senate, despite frequently performing the functions of the President, so, strictly speaking, all of the answers are wrong.

Except in the case where a vacancy occurs in the Vice Presidency during a term, in which case the President does appoint a Vice President who is confirmed by the House of Representatives, so (c) would in that case be correct -- but that wasn't true until 1967.

You might be right

There is no ambiguity, (b) is unambiguously correct (more precisely, it puts it in that hands of State legislatures).

The Amendment making (c) correct in some circumstances was passed in 1967, so presumably would not be referenced by a test written before that date.

What about the Supremacy Clause? And aren't state legislatures elected by "the people"? You could argue about this forever.

But what if I vote three times in three different locations all different from my "home" polling location?

You don't. You'd find contemporaneous accounts from people who'd taken the test and complained about it. That's how the social science of history works. I think the consensus here is that the brain-teaser test is either not real, or was not widely used (nobody has been able to find an instance where it was).

A clarifying bit of context: there were extensive complaints about the multiple-choice constitutional interpretation tests that were given at the time.

Yes. Which is why, even in the 1960s, even in Louisiana, state courts struck these tests down. I agree with you about them. The only disputed fact here is whether the "write backwards forwards" test was ever administered.

It's rare but it does happen.

Fairly? No. At all? Obviously yes, because the unfairness of the tests we know to have been administered was widely covered.

How does the electoral commission knows where to send the voting card? Does the voter need to register with some electoral commission (governmental agency)?

> Now they have an online verification process before handing you the ballot papers

How can a voting observer ensure that double voting is actually blocked by this system? Government can whitelist people 10x-voting the right way (real case from Russia).

Issuing 10 passeports to these people is orders of magnitude harder to scale and will have negative consequences (fraud elsewhere) a government is typically less willing to take.

> However if some party control a part of the voting system, they can do whatever they want in several ways. For example vote with the ballots of people that didn't go to vote.

They did that in my country at scale. Physical presence is a must-have if you ask me.

> Yes. Which is why, even in the 1960s, even in Louisiana, state courts struck these tests down.

I'm pretty sure the reason why, "even in the 1960s, even in Louisiana", state courts struck the tests down is that such tests categorically were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1949, not because of the particular unfairness of particular tests as viewed by the state courts in the 1960s.

If the network is connected, the first time you vote succeeds and marks you as having voted; subsequent attempts fail because they know you've already voted.

If the network is not connected, your three remote ballots go into envelopes marked "dh2022" and in the week following the election they are physically transported to your home polling location, at which point they see that you tried to vote three times, set those ballots aside, and call the police.

right, the test exists as the last unbeatable line of defense, not the first.

This breaks the anonymity of the vote, marks can be traced back to real people.

It also allows fraud by voting for people who didn't show up.

State legislatures are elected by the people nowadays yes. But is that required by the Constitution or just a modern convention? I honestly don't know, as a 45 yr old born and raised in the US college educated nerd. The trump administration shenanigans revealed a lot of things we all took for granted to be mere convention or tradition rather than legal requirements.

Fortunately, you only had to answer 4 of 6 correctly. https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf

We may be protected from the specific literacy tests mentioned here, but there are modern variations that accomplish the same goal of disenfranchising black voters. North Carolina's legislature asked for data showing how white folks and black folks used various voting techniques (in person vs by mail, preregister vs day of register, etc) , and then modified the voting rules to specifically lower black votes. One judge used the phrase "with surgical precision". They were so blatant about their true intention a federal court struck it down.

But other states saw what they did and managed to pass similar laws with just a tad more subtlety and plausible deniability.

All languages as long as a translator could be found and hired by the government. Of course the cost of hiring the translator and doing the translation should be borne by the government.

A multi-language literacy test also forces the test writer to write questions that are language agnostic. No more things like "spell this word" or "circle the longest word" as seen in the article.

Fair point, it's not just a modern convention but yes, I think in theory a state constitution could be changed to make the whole legislature appointed by the governor or chosen by lottery or whatever.

Why would you assume that actual election ink is as easily washable as that? Surely other people thought about the problem at hand for more than a minute, right?

It actually stains fingernails in such a way that the ink only truly disappears when the nail grows.

From Wikipedia:

> Election stain typically stays on skin for 72–96 hours, lasting 2 to 4 weeks on the fingernail and cuticle area. The election ink used puts a permanent mark on the cuticle area, which only disappears with the growth of the new nail. It can take up to 4 months for the stain to be replaced completely by new nail growth. Stains with concentrations of silver nitrate higher than 18% have been found to have no added effect on stain longevity, as silver nitrate does not have a photosensitive reaction with live skin cells. This means that the stain will fade as new skin grows.

Thank you for including a link for reference. I may have missed some substance in the article, so help me out if I missed it. For my part, I'm not sure that the court would make additions to law, but maybe they should have allowed an option for Congress to update the law so that section 4 applied to all states? I can see that if you view section 4 of the VRA to be an important construct for citizen voting protections, nation wide application of the statute would only further protect the populace...

Haven't followed specifics in North Carolina. But it seems as though the structure of statutes allowed the court to disallow the action(s), hopefully via injunction to prevent inappropriate implementation. This would however, support the case that statutes and understanding of intent are there.

Hopefully in the other unnamed states/actions that have been taken since, the impact will be small, or preferably, their actions will face similar repeal.

> Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to adopt a new Section 5 coverage formula, but there are signs that it is inching ever closer to success. In January 2022 the House passed a package of democracy reforms that included the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have updated the Section 5 coverage formula. Though the package commanded the support of a majority of senators, it narrowly failed due to the inability of the body to reform its archaic filibuster rules.

-- [0]

The act would have set pre-clearance to occur based on a pattern of recent violations [1], and also made election day a holiday, promoted early-voting etc... So you can guess which party was for it and which was doing the filibustering.

Related, the NVRA has another section about how states aren't supposed to mass-purge voters right before an election [2] (whether it's blatantly discrimiantory or not) but without pre-clearance it may lack teeth.

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/prec...

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4

[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-virgi...

ArtIV.S4 "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government", meaning elected by the People.

Here in the northeastern US, we get a substantial number of people who try to vote in the town where they work, or a town where they've had dinner after work, rather than the town they live in.

>and peaceful transfers of power.

Yep, this is something the US can no longer claim, sadly.

This reminds me of college chemistry lab. The nitric acid was always interesting because when that got on your skin, it turned yellow, permanently. For skin, this would wear off quickly (on fingers at least), but if it got on your fingernails, those would turn yellow and it would never come out, until the nail had grown out.

Good point. I was trying to look up what the procedure was for replacing a VP before that, but failed. It almost must have been done at least once before then right? I couldn't recall or find though.

There was, in fact, no procedure for replacing the VP; the move for the amendment to correct that came about after, and motivated largely by, the Kennedy assassination and the vacancy in the term Johnson completed; historically, vacancies in the Vice Presidency hadn't been considered important enough to do something about, but the Cold War changed that.

> You shouldn't lose your right to vote because you don't know which office of government pays USPS mail carriers or the term length of US judges.

That isn't actually all that clear cut. I'd agree that it is probably a bad idea, but there is potential that the results would be better if voters understood the system that they were delivering instructions into.

The government already knows where people live. Every time you move, you have to notify your municipality.

These sorts of 'tests' are not unique to the south. The record keeping and newspapers of the day would just sort of hint that they were necessary to maintain status quo.

Australian immigration had a similar literacy/dictation test for migrants under the 'White Australia' policy up until the 1940's. If the migration officer didnt like the look of you, you'd be given a test to dictate welsh instead english, as it was a 'prescribed english language'.

The Stack Exchange community seems to have concluded that it is not authentic: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57431/in-1964-w...

> It's the Vice President, who is elected by the people

No he’s not: the Vice President is elected by the Electoral College, or if they do not do so then by the Senate (see the Twelfth Amendment).

Neither is the President elected by the people: he’s also elected by the Electoral College, or if they fail to do so then by the House of Representatives, voting by state.

It would also be a republican form of government for the state legislatures to be elected by cities and/or counties.

You... You realize that they could just have two tests in a drawer, and they give one to black people, and one to white people, including reporters and federal officials? Why are you dying on this hill??

That comes from a time/place where it was issued to 100% adult citizens and it was illegal not to have it - i.e. you have a duty to get one when you come of age or become a citizen or your old one expires, and it's a misdemeanor with some fines if you don't, plus quite a few other legal interactions will be simply refused until you get that sorted out.

Now an ID card is a valid option so some people have only the ID card and not a proper passport; but there is an expectation that everyone (who isn't e.g. actively hiding from the authorities as an outlaw) would have a valid ID and if they don't it's acceptable to require that they get one before they can fully interact with the rest of the society e.g. government, banking, driving, owning real estate or cars, any legal contracts such as rent or credit, etc.

What do you think a right wing position is? These were democrats writing literacy tests. Democrats were pro slavery, then pro jim crow. I imagine the right winge position is to support highlighting every real literacy test as a history the legacy of the democrat party.