Voting Rights Act

Steve Sailer:

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the most successful of the famous civil rights enactments of the 1960s. It dealt with a genuine issue—the systematic finagling by the ruling Democratic Party in Southern states to keep most black citizens from voting—and solved it almost immediately.

As soon as blacks had the vote, they were well equipped to protect that right. The number of black voters and officeholders shot upwards. White Southern politicians, such as George Wallace, responded to the now-level electoral playing field by dropping anti-black demagoguery.

The calm, prosperous modern South soon emerged, with the black minority dominating the Democratic Party and most of the white majority moving into its natural home in the Republican Party. Under this fair system, conservatives do well in the South.

Today, when you hear about blacks having problems at the election booth, as many did in trying to cast valid ballots in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida, they are almost always self-inflicted.

The 2000 Presidential election in Florida has become encrusted in myths ("Blacks were disenfranchised!") because what really happened stems directly from the media's Great Unmentionable: the white-black IQ gap.

In Florida, more Gore supporters showed up to vote than Bush supporters. But as so often happens, the Democrats botched up their ballots, rendering them invalid, at a higher rate than the Republicans. Most unmentionably, Gore's biggest problem was that blacks, who voted for him by at least a 10-1 margins, were much more likely to make a hash of their ballots than were whites, who tended to support Bush.

One Person, One Vote