The American Democracy Minute Radio Report & Podcast for July 2, 2024
Today’s Script
(Variations occur with audio due to editing for time. Today’s Links below the script)
You’re listening to the American Democracy Minute, keeping YOUR government by and for the people.
The North Carolina Senate endorsed a ballot measure June 25th prohibiting noncitizens from voting – for which there is already existing law. And the Senate declined another measure repealing a racist Jim Crow-era literacy test to vote, still enshrined in the state’s constitution.
There is no evidence that more than a handful of noncitizens have voted in any federal or state elections nationally. Yet noncitizen voting has been among the loudest accusations in this election cycle. All 50 states already prohibit noncitizens from voting in state elections, and a 1996 federal law prohibits it in federal elections. BallotPedia reports that 16 municipalities and the District of Columbia DO allow noncitizen voting in municipal elections only.
North Carolina would become the fifth state this year to put a measure on the November 2024 ballot. Five other states recently passed similar measures, pushed by former Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell.
The state senate also rejected a measure proposing repeal of a Jim Crow-era literacy test for voting, enshrined in the state constitution since 1899 even after the 1965 Voting Right Act banned such discrimination in voting.
Sec. 4.
Voter registration requires literacy test and payment of poll taxes. Every person presenting himself for registration shall be able to read and write any section of the Constitution in the English language; and, before he shall be entitled to vote, he shall have paid, on or before the first day of March of the year in which he proposes to vote, his poll tax, as prescribed by law, for the previous year. Poll taxes shall be a lien only on assessed property, and no process shall issue to enforce the collection of the same, except against assessed property.
Suffrage Amendment, 1899, Ratified in 1900
In a 109 – 0 vote, the state House approved sending the ballot measure to voters to repeal it, but WRAL reports the senate voted the measure down, with one senator suggesting that the bill was too last minute.
Read the measures and local reporting linked from AmericanDemocracyMinute.org. I’m Brian Beihl.
Today’s Links
Articles & Resources:
North Carolina State Constitution – 1899 Suffrage Amendment
Democracy North Carolina – The literacy test was a tool originally used to prevent Black, Brown, and Indigenous North Carolinians from voting.
WRAL – NC constitutional amendments: Legislature approves citizen-only voting, rejects repeal of Jim Crow literacy test law
North Carolina Legislature – HB 1074 – Constitutional Amendment/Citizens-Only Voting
North Carolina Legislature – HB 44 – Constitutional Amendment/Repeal Literacy Test
The Guardian – Far-right US groups coalescing to stoke unfounded fears of non-citizens voting
BallotPedia – Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States
Groups Taking Action:
Democracy North Carolina, NAACP High Point Chapter
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