Literacy test

A literacy test, in a pure sense, would be a test designed to determine one's ability to read and write a given language. However, in the sense intended here, it is a test formerlly given to determine one's eligibility to vote.

Literacy requirments for voting are almost as old as the concept of voting is itself. The theorhetical basis for them was that illiterate persons were not sufficiently informed about the candidates and issues involved to be able to make a truly informed decision. In practice, however, the literacy requirment was often used to prevent those determined by the ruling class to be undersirable, such as the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and other groups that it wished to see disenfranchised, from voting.

The literacy test became of prime importance when the Fifteenth Amendement to the United States Constitution was ratified in the wake of the American Civil War. This amendment forbade any state from forbidding any male citizen aged twenty-one or over from voting on the basis of race. Since few whites in the Southern United States desired blacks to vote in that era, the literacy test was frequently used to deny them this right. Most blacks had been kept illiterate as a consequence of slavery. And literacy tests were often administered to blacks unfairly to ensure their failure, even if the black person taking them was in fact literate. Also, whites were often allowed to vote even if they were illiterate, sometimes by the invocation of a Grandfather clause which stated that literacy requirments could be waived if a potential voter's grandfather had been a qualified voter, a virtual impossibility for blacks of that era.

Literacy tests for voting were banned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and now laws require the priniting of ballots in languages other than English in areas where there are high concentrations of non-Engilsh-speaking voters, and arrangements are made to assist the illiterate in voting. Literacy tests for voting in the United States thus no longer exist.