Should African Americans Have The Right To Vote

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Prison votes differ from state to state, in the majority of states your voting rights are automatically restored once inmates have completed their sentence. In some states, you have to enter an application in order to vote and your voting rights are restrained while in jail. Almost 4.6 million Americans, 2 percent of people of age, who can vote, however they cannot vote due to past felonies. This means that 4.6 million Americans cannot use their rights to their fullest extent, they can’t use one of the most important rights, the right to vote. Voting rights are the legal compromise that can stop you from voting. There have been many improvements to make voting more accessible to everyone over the past decades. In 1776, only rich white men who owned a lot of property, around 6% of the population, could vote. Now anyone eighteen and older can vote, no matter race, gender, or how rich or poor you are. The fifteenth amendment says that African American men can vote. Then the nineteenth amendment made it that way anyone can vote regardless of gender and more amendments such as the twenty-third amendment were passed after this to expand the amount of people who can vote. …show more content…
In Durham, Louisville, and St. Louis it was shown that people of African-American descent had to spend more time in jail than other groups of people who had committed the same crime but were not of African-American descent. If people cannot vote after they get released from jail, it would mean that people of African-American descent would have lower voting participation. This would violate the fifteenth amendment, that made it that way any male can vote, no matter the