Testing Our Patience
- Nobody can be denied the right to vote for refusing to comply with any test put in place, unless the U.S. District Court, after the state's brought their case against the United States, determines there had been no such test or device used in the past five years to affect the right to vote on account of race or color.
- If the scan comes up clean, so to speak, then the Attorney General can give the thumbs-up to such a test.
- That ruling applies to states that a) apply tests and b) in which fifty percent of the voting-age population did not vote in 1964. Basically, that's their metric for seeing if tampering is going on.
- (Btw: "Test or device" in this Act means any test checking reading comprehension, subject knowledge, morality, or matching up to other voters.)
- No state can be touched with Section 4's rules if their cases of vote strangulation were few in number, those incidents were taken care of, and there isn't really a chance of them occurring in the future.
- Essentially? Reform early, and you don't have to worry about legal action.
- Since America has its flag on a decent chunk of foreign territories (Puerto Rico says hi), poll tests can't test for knowledge of the English language.
- If the voter-in-question has a sixth grade education or equivalent, no matter what language the classroom was taught in the classroom, they can't be denied the right to vote based on their inability to understand English.