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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Which minorities don’t have voting rights? Are you sure you’re in the correct century?

You don't have to say some community cannot vote, you can suppress their political rights by other subtle actions like closing voting centers in areas they predominantly live, gerrymandering district boundaries such that they are insufficiently represented in state assemblies, etc.

Early in the last century, poll taxes were popular, as well as literacy tests. There are a lot of methods to make it harder for people you don’t like to vote.

- Felons, in varying degrees in different states.

- Residents of DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam

- People who have had their names removed from voter roles with no warning, as in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, in the last few years.

- People who can't get US citizenship despite having lived here most or all of their lives.

- Vulnerable individuals who couldn't get an absentee ballot in Texas despite the pandemic

And so on. They're smaller, more specific minorities now. But there's a lot of them

Nothing here supports the argument that minorities don’t have voting rights, and I think the fact that you’re trying to stretch this to include non-citizens says a lot about how honest the original comment was.

I understand how you could assume that these issues aren't about minorities, but they really all are. Each of these issues barely touches white people while affecting minorities deeply.

- Felony convictions: Black and latino men are convicted of felonies at much higher rates than any other population. In 2016, 7.44% of black people had their voting rights stripped for felony convictions.[1] Over 1% of all black people in the United States are currently incarcerated, compared with about .2% for white people.[2]

- DC in majority minority, with 46% black residents.[3] Puerto Rico in 98.9% hispanic.[4]

- Citizenship: Over 800,000 people have enrolled in DACA, mostly of Latin American and East Asian origin. [5] They are ineligible for citizenship. Among those eligible to apply for Citizenship, many are from Canada or Europe.[6] Our immigration laws are setup to favor high school immigrants, who are far more likely to be white than the immigrant population as a whole. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means our voting population is far more white than our resident population.

- Disenfranchisement: This is far more piecemeal, but southern states routinely take actions that just so happen to make it more difficult for minorities to vote rather than white people. I recommend listening to [7] if you're interested, which covers a specific recent circumstance in Florida, with a few examples from other states. It's no coincidence when eliminated polling places and dropboxes just so happen to always be in Black neighborhoods.

Remember, the voting rights marches of the 1960s weren't about giving black people the right to vote, that happened in 1870. They were about how certain states had made it so difficult for black people to vote that it was essentially impossible. Sure, many black people vote in these states today, but that doesn't mean that they have an equal ability to vote. The measures aren't as strong as they once were, but they still exist.

[1] https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08... [2] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p19.pdf [3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC [4] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/PR [5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/25/key-facts-a... [6] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/lpr_pop... [7] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/927846676/who-gets-to-vote-in...

Minorities are disproportionately affected by long waiting times. Minorities have to wait twice as long to vote on average. Examples abound of people having to wait 5+ hours just to vote in heavily Democratic, minority locations. Its an easy problem to solve - add more/better locations, more voting machines, more poll workers - but seems to be consistently ignored or even exacerbated.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smartphone-data-s...

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