Single women and Black men voting in New Jersey's elections until 1807. Scandinavian immigrants favoring literacy tests to prevent Italian immigrants from registering to vote.
Welcome to the complicated history of voting rights in the United States!
Today’s episode is a little different. We’re just two days after the US Presidential Election and the results remain unknown. I don’t know about you, but I can’t focus on anything except for refreshing New York Times’s website and calculating electoral votes.
The word of the day is “doom scrolling.”
So, today’s episode is shorter and doesn’t have a guest. Instead, let’s talk about immigration and voting in the United States, particularly how immigration and voting are inextricably linked in the US, the immigration policies that each of the two presidential candidates in 2020 would enact, and the idea of extending the right to vote to non-citizen residents.
If you’d rather wait to hear from someone other than me, next week’s guest is Jihan Aziz. Together with her parents and sister, Jihan immigrated from Iraq to Canada in the 90s. It's a great episode and it'll be out next Thursday, November 12th.
Until then, follow along the winding (and long-winded) brief history of US Voting Rights and immigration.
