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

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250 points rcarmo | 4 comments | 21 Oct 24 21:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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nneonneo ◴[21 Oct 24 23:35 UTC] No.41909665[source]▶
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

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1. trukledeitz ◴[22 Oct 24 16:23 UTC] No.41915908[source]▶
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?

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2. Terr_ ◴[22 Oct 24 16:45 UTC] No.41916128[source]▶
> 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/

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3. mrgoldenbrown ◴[22 Oct 24 18:13 UTC] No.41917046[source]▶
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.

4. trukledeitz ◴[22 Oct 24 19:11 UTC] No.41917603[source]▶
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...