In This Edition

• President's Message
• Election Resources
• Looking Ahead
• Highlights from Last Month
• Honor and Support DEI
• LWVGT Board of Directors
• Contact The Voter

• Voter Registration Deadline - October 5, 2026
  
• Ballots mailed and early voting begins - October 7, 2026
  
• Last day to request a mail in ballot - October 23, 2026
  
• Recommended deadline to mail back your ballot - October 27, 2026
  
• Election Day and last day to vote in person or drop off a mail ballot- November 3, 2026

• $30.00 for one day
• $200.00 for one week
• $900.00 for one month

• Conflict and De-Escalation: Navigating Tension with Clarity and Care
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Session

• National Archives provides documents HERE

• The following important historical context is provided by The Brennan Center. When the 19th Amendment became the law of the land after hard-fought campaigning, white women immediately benefited from its ratification. But for millions of women of color across a significant portion of the country, gaining the right to vote would take several more decades.
  
  The 19th Amendment did not eradicate the systemic racism that pervaded the South, where most Black women lived, and other regions. Fifty years earlier, the 15th Amendment, which barred states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” was ratified. Despite this guarantee, with the blessing of the courts, states across the South enacted racially discriminatory policies — such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and felony disenfranchisement laws. These restrictions kept many Black women, Black men, and other voters of color out of the democratic process until the rise of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.
  
  In many parts of the country, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women were also largely excluded from the ballot box at the time the 19th Amendment was passed until each group gained access to voting in the succeeding decades.
  
  Native Americans, who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship in 1920, experienced none of the benefits of the ratification of the 15th and 19th Amendments. It wasn’t until the passage of the Snyder Act of 1924, which granted citizenship to U.S.-born Native Americans, that Native American men and women achieved some access to the ballot. Still, like Black Americans, they were disenfranchised for decades afterward by racially discriminatory tactics, including claims that living on a reservation meant that a person was not a resident of the state.
  
  Asian women, too, were excluded from the ballot box by racist laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented Asian immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens. It wasn’t until three decades after the 19th Amendment was ratified that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 granted Asian immigrants the right to naturalize and gain full citizenship, enabling them to participate in elections.
  
  For Latina women, “white primaries” in the South as well as deliberately discriminatory English literacy tests across the Sunbelt effectively kept them from full access to the polls even after the 19th Amendment passed.
  
  It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the promise of the 19th Amendment became a reality for most women of color. This pivotal civil rights legislation banned racial discrimination in voting, opening the door for equal access to the democratic process.
  
  There were still hurdles to be overcome, however. For women who were primarily non-English speakers, particularly in the Latino and Asian American communities, exercising the right to vote remained burdensome until the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act. That year, Section 203 was added to the law to require that all voting and election materials be provided “in the language of the applicable minority group as well as in the English language.”

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