Mara Gay: GOP Efforts to Restrict Voting in N.C. Remind Me of the Jim Crow Era

EXCERPT:

GAY: “Well, we should kind of pull back and think about the enormous kind of reversal of reality that we’re living through right now. This is not a country that has a history in which voters who are not eligible to vote participated in elections. This is a country that has a history within living memory of refusing to allow large numbers of its population to vote, to have the right to suffrage because of the color of their skin or other backgrounds. And so, I think that in North Carolina, in particular, this is a very dark history. When I read that piece, which I did last night, I thought, you know, this reminds me of the various other mechanisms that southern states and Jim Crow used to use to deny the right to vote to black Americans. So, poll taxes, literacy taxes, having to answer kind of inane questions about the U.S. Constitution, if you’re a black voter, but giving simpler answers, or questions to white voters. So, you don’t get to pick and choose in this country who gets the right to vote. The core tenet of this democracy is that one man, one citizen, one vote. And Donald Trump is threatened by that.”