How to Vote

I celebrated the anniversary of women's suffrage yesterday by going to a demonstration in downtown LosAngeles.

You know all about voting, right? Here are a few tidbits of information to chew on:

From the International Business Times:

The Senate passed the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919, and on Nov. 2 of the same year over 8 million women across the U.S. voted for the very first time. It took over 60 years for all U.S. states to ratify the amendment with Mississippi being the last one to do so on March 22, 1984.

This amendment was the center of controversy this election season when #RepealThe19th began trending on Twitter after polls found that Republican nominee Donald Trump would win if only men voted and his rival Hillary Clinton would become president if only women voted.

From the Asian American Legal Defense Fund:

Throughout United States history, Asian Americans have been disenfranchised by discriminatory laws that denied citizenship to Asian immigrants and rendered them ineligible to vote. It was not until 1943 that Chinese Americans were first permitted to become citizens. For Asian Indians, it was 1946. For Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans, that right did not come until 1952.

Also from the International Business Times:

While the 15th Amendment allowed all U.S. citizens the right to vote irrespective of their race or color, Native Americans weren’t allowed to vote until the passage of the Snyder Act of 1924, also called the Indian Citizenship Act.

However, even with the passage of this act, Native Americans were still not allowed to vote as the Constitution left it to the states to decide who could and couldn’t vote. It took Native Americans about four decades to achieve suffrage in all U.S. states.

This massive timeline lays it all out. When George Washington was president only 6% of the people could vote!!!

And I thought about my mom yesterday. She was super serious about getting out to vote. I don't think she ever missed a presidential election. When she left my home to go back to Iowa and live in a nursing home in 2015, I don't think we thought about registering her to vote in Iowa. It would have been complicated. Since she was in a new state, she would have had to prove residency. No utility bill. No official mail with the care facilities address on it. No driver's license--though I'm sure we could have gotten her a state I.D. in Iowa like she had in California so that she fill out the application to vote by absentee ballot in her new state since actually getting to the polls would have been difficult. As we baby boomers get older and older, I think this is something we want to think about...ahead of time.