Why Do African Americans Participate In Elections?

Even after the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment, African Americans were “disenfranchised in the South by intimidation and electoral trickery, including whites-only primaries, rigged literacy tests, and poll taxes” (Patterson 2011, p. 180). The Freedom Riders rode through the South, enduring harassment and imprisonment to encourage other African Americans to vote. Voter turnout in African American communities is greatly encouraged. Personally, coming from an African American family, I was strongly encouraged by my parents and grandparents to vote when I was of legal age. My family instilled the importance of voting in me at a very young age. Although voter turnout among African Americans is still fairly low, in the 2008 presidential election African Americans had the second highest voter turnout, behind non-Hispanic Caucasians (African Americans, n.d.). Race can influence voter turnout because with African Americans specifically, although rates are getting better, they are still not high.

The debate over compulsory vs. non-compulsory voting is a complex subject matter to say the least, that has sparked much controversy in recent times with almost all strongly in favor of one side of the argument and or the other. This highly polarized debate has sparked in popularity in recent times because of a quote by former president Barak Obama in which he said that “It would be transformative if everybody voted”. It is believed that if everyone voted that could and was eligible then the domination of hard core partisans within the political system would be in part quelled as the candidates went where the votes are, which would be away from the extremes. Moreover some studies show that mandatory voting decreases the rates of uninformed voters within an area as voting becomes more of a civic duty than right. While the institution of compulsory voting would have a short term effect of increasing the rate of uninformed voters,

While women make up a majority of the population in Africa, the number of representatives of women in parliament is substantially less than men. The underrepresentation of women in politics is problematic because the empowerment of women and the development of a society relies on the success of maintaining gender equity. Though this is an international issue, I plan to focus on representation of women in politics in sub-Saharan Africa. I hope to explore why the percentage of women in politics is smaller than that of men and how this affects gender equity. Fortunately, representation is improving at a steady rate and I will explain the factors that are contributing to this increase.

The year 1964 marked the official beginning of the realignment of the black population. The Republican party previous to this year never officially made a stance on race, so it was never considered a partisanship issue, until now. The political decisions of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan solidified the black democratic partisanship, as well as the Southern white republican partisanship. As the years have past the black democratic partisanship has become a racially polarized and the republicans have given up on achieving a higher black vote in elections. But maybe they should reconsider giving up and try a different approach that lets them keep their southern white vote and expand on the black vote that they are getting.

Voting is political power and restrictions diluted as well as denied any significant to the Negro right to vote. What good is a vote if the vote is not counted in the race.

In order to prevent African Americans from voting, white’s enacted a variety of different measures used for preventing black voting. Of these measures three big ones were the use of violence, all white-primary elections, and the grandfather clause. For whites violence was a means in which they could forcibly prevent African Americans from voting in town elections. Many times blacks that tried to vote, received some kind of violent backlash, whether it was getting beat or losing their jobs. In 1898, Democrats from Grimes County, following their loss organized a secret brotherhood, in which they eventually in cold blood shot two black leaders (Henretta, pg. 609).

Voting is the foremost way to exhibit good citizenship and civil responsibility. People should get involved in elections and educated in all political measures. By this they become good and responsible participatory citizens. It should always be remembered that some people sacrifice their lives to preserve the freedom and voting opportunity as a sacred right. True democracy demands the involvement of the people otherwise in absence of that there is no democracy(Akande, 2011).

Robert Smalls preludes his essay Election Methods in the South by stating how important the right to vote is and how it is our given right by the Constitution to be able to vote no matter perceived differences. Smalls goes into detail how the government in South Carolina is corrupt in counting the ballot and in how there is no “free ballot.” “Elections since then have been carried by perjury and fraud – two things worshipped and adored by the South Carolina Democracy.” Smalls shows us two extremes polls not being open or being open but corrupt in counting for Republicans. He shows us how much the African American people and their votes are needed to make our government stronger as a whole.

People hate to be isolated. Sadly, people are the ones who actually initiates isolation. In some way, we are harming each other. World is becoming a very horrible place; intelligent people are shunned, education is shot, ignorance is rewarded and police are corrupt. We can’t live with each other when a race is isolated. A person who is different in community by his or her skin color is classified as an outcast. Outcasts have no right speak up. That is why I think race and ethnicity have an effect on political participation. Although lately there are some improvements, that didn’t have a big impact on people.

For generations, African Americans have been denied the right to be considered citizens, and even after they were granted the full protection of the law as citizens, they lacked descriptive representation in the government. According to several studies, while Democrats typically represent a majority of African

Political Leadership involves leading people in the right manner that will lead to the achievement of set goals. This requires the political leaders to have special skills that the ordinary citizen doesn’t have so as to lead in a proper way. Additionally, leaders are expected to have the power to fight for the people’s rights to any opposing or discriminating the people. During the colonization time, most of the people from African countries were colonized by the Western countries that lead to the movement of these people from Africa to western Countries and America so as to serve as slaves. As such, the population of Africans in America increased at a very high rate which impacted on the Africa American people to be exposed to slavery, suffering, and prejudice. Henceforth, the calling of leaders to represent the Africa-American emerged. Most of the time, these leaders were subjected to a lot of mistreatments as well as cruelty, in order to destroy the hopes of advocating for the rights of the black people.

Although African women continue to make solid progress in becoming part of the political scene, there are limitations associated with this progress. More African women are beginning to enter the political landscape and are making great strides in influencing policies that favors the advancement of women.

There are significant correlations between voting results and exposure of violence, and some of these correlations could be manipulated by politicians to target their own preference hence induces the first referendum failure. The two characteristics of rebel violence, civilian killing and kidnappings, have different effects on the voting result. The total rebel violence and the exposure to kidnappings has a significant positive impact on share of NO votes, yet not with the exposure to civilian killings. Furthermore, the exposure to rebel violence has no general impact on voters’ turnout ratio, whereas civilian killings might depress some citizens to not participate in public referendum.

Nigeria is one of the African countries that is responding to Western pressures to make its states acquire a liberal and democratic culture. Over the years, Nigeria has practiced what can be described as fraudulent democracy. This democracy has been characterized by obnoxious acts such as indiscriminately using money and by very powerful and influential members of the elite class, popularly called ‚political godfathers,’ imposing political leaders on the people. This situation has already become a culture in Nigeria because many politicians who want to contest and win elections always look for such persons to support them. This means that they no longer depend on the electorates to win elections, but instead rely on the political godfathers. This political culture was truncated in the 2007 gubernatorial election in Edo state, Nigeria. This paper examines how the problem of money politics and political godfatherism can be eliminated from Nigeria’s politics in order to strengthen democratic governance in the country. The methodology of the study is essentially analytical and based on lessons from

Dr A Kefale, The Role of Independent National Institutions in Multiparty Democracy in Africa: Some Observations, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia