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1/2 Listen friends of all political stripes: Democracy works best when everyone participates. We've worked hard over the last 225 yrs or so to continue to live into this important democratic principle.
2/ We have worked hard as a nation over the last 225 yrs or so, to be more inclusive! Did you know that only 6% of the population was eligible to vote for George Washington for President? Yeah, that's just nuts.
3/The above is a great explainer video that I used when I taught high school civics, but there is one glaring omission, @PerezHilton. Native Americans, the first inhabitants of this land, had to wait until *1924* to be eligible to cast a ballot because they weren't citizens.
4/And even then, many states created legal and other barriers preventing indigenous ppl from voting. #NewMexico was the final hold out... in 1962.
Read more about that here: https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/elections/voting-rights-native-americans.html
Read more about that here: https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/elections/voting-rights-native-americans.html
5/Seriously. 1962. Can you even wrap your head around that? The descendents of the Ancestral Puebloan people who built Chaco Canyon have been considered citizens for less than 100 yrs and only been allowed to vote for 58 years.
