Black Americans slam Ramaswamy’s plan
Call proposed civics test for young voters discrimination
WASHINGTON — JoAnne Bland was 11 when she crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 – known as Bloody Sunday – with hundreds of others to protest Black Americans being denied voting rights.
Bland recalled that her father and grandmother both failed tests they had to take to register to vote. She said taking the journey across the bridge in Selma, Alabama, made her who she is today.
“Getting the right to vote to me meant I would be able to go in to sit at a counter that I wanted to like the white kids do,” Bland, 70, said. “I’ve dedicated my life to making sure that we keep the right to vote even though it’s attacked.”
Five months after Bloody Sunday, former President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which helped outlaw literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices adopted after the Civil War.
Today, some Black Americans say Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to implement a civics test for voters ages 18 to 24 gives them flashbacks to those hurdles.
Ramaswamy has argued the test would be the same one immigrants have to take in order to become citizens of the U.S. The alternative to the test would be six months of military or first-responder service. If people did not pass the test or qualify for any exemptions, they could vote beginning at 25.
“It is a problem that young people don’t vote enough in this country,” Ramaswamy told Iowans at a campaign event in May. “But if you make it something that you actually have to earn, you value it even more. It’s human nature and psychology.”
When he first floated the plan in the summer, however, it immediately drew ire from voters who are part of the group Black Girls Vote, according to Natasha Murphy, the organization’s chief of staff.
“Having known what it feels like to be singled out as a group and somehow unfit to really participate as a voter, I think there was that discomfort with having that same label placed on someone due to their age solely,” she said.
Black voters draw parallels to 1960s
Though the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right for Black Americans to vote, some Southern states passed literacy test requirements and offered exemptions for white people after the Civil War, said Olga Koulisis, assistant professor of
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The tests would include questions surrounding historical events or the Constitution, but these were often “very difficult, even for someone who pays attention to these kinds of issues,” said Brent Taylor, social science coordinator at West Kentucky Community and Technical College.
Some of the questions were also designed for test takers to fail. Flonzie Brown-Wright, 81, who attempted to register to vote in 1964, previously said the test she took had questions such as “How many feathers are in a chicken?” She also had to interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution, which she did not study at her segregated school.
Alonzo Davis, an 81-year-old artist living in Maryland, still recalls when his father came home after attempting to register to vote and felt “humiliated” by taking the test. Davis, 10 at the time, said he was too young to understand what was happening.
Black voter registration in states such as Mississippi and Alabama by 1940 were lower than 0.5% after the tests were implemented, Taylor said.
Black voters told USA TODAY they feel Ramaswamy’s proposal mirrors the literacy tests used decades ago.
“It sounds reasonable on its surface, but its implementation is really discriminatory. And that’s what Vivek Ramaswamy is proposing now for 18- to 24year-olds, particularly as that demographic changes, and as that demographic is much more progressive than the Republicans are,” said Carol Anderson, an Emory University professor.
Martese Chism, a 62-year-old retired nurse who lives in Mississippi, agreed, saying that she thinks Ramaswamy is trying to rebrand the literacy test and that voting rights groups will have to fight against it.
“We’re gonna have a fight like we did during the Civil Rights Movement ... he’s stripping the right from a generation behind him and that’s not right,” said Chism, who said her great-grandmother was denied the right to vote even test.
Bland said that she feels like “we have a parallel to the ’60s all over again” and called the proposal “just another ploy to to retain power.”
The concern among Black voters comes as activists challenge what they say create barriers for voters, from voter ID laws to strict rules surrounding mail-in ballots.
“Right now, anything is an obstacle when it comes to what’s going on in this country about people and voting ... you got to be careful when you make those kinds of proposals because that right there, that’s Civil War talk,” said Harold Hart, a 45-year-old framing company owner based in Mississippi.
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Ramaswamy defends test
When asked about Black voters’ concerns, Ramaswamy said he understands that “we have been imperfect in our national history in franchising all Americans, and that we have to learn from those mistakes of the past to never commit them again.”
However, he argued that he isn’t making the civics test up on the fly, and the U.S. does already use a test for naturalized citizens.
“You also have to at least know some basic element about the country in order to know who you’re voting for and how,” he said. “That’s basic table stakes of what you have to know in order to be able to vote.”
He added, “For the same reason it makes sense for naturalized citizens, I think it makes sense for all citizens of this country as well ... Just so people have some sense of identity and skin in the game and basic knowledge, civic knowledge or civic experience, that I think will help unite us as a country.”
Ramaswamy has said he would implement his test through a constitutional amendment. For any amendment to pass, it typically must be approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate and be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures.
Several experts likely isn’t feasible.
“I don’t know that the way politics are right now if you’re going to get threefourths of the states to agree,” Taylor said.
It would also have to override several sections of the Constitution, including the 26th Amendment which in effect grants most 18-year-old Americans the right to vote, according to Spencer Overturn, a law professor at George Washington University.
“As a policy matter, Ramaswamy’s proposal is anti-democratic because it disproportionately burdens younger voters, who are already underrepresented in voter turnout and are likely to feel the implications of current public policy decisions for the next 50-75 years,” Overturn said.
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“You also have to at least know some basic element about the country in order to know who you’re voting for and how. That’s basic table stakes of what you have to know in order to be able to vote.”
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