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Category - US Government

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Many activists believed that terminating grandfather clauses, which exempted voters from literacy tests, would help enfranchise African-American voters, but it had the unintended consequence of doing what?
  1. Enfranchising undocumented immigrants because carrying identification (like an I.D. card) was less common during that time and election officials had trouble weeding non-citizens out of the voter pool
  2. Enfranchising more women voters who should have been able to vote but couldn't due to their inability to demonstrate patrilineal descent
  3. Disenfranchising many African-American voters who were afraid to go to the polls due to the upsurge in violent retaliation white election officials began to employ to continue blocking black voters
  4. Disenfranchising many poor, white, predominantly Southern voters who could not pass literacy tests but were previously able to vote due to a grandfather clause
Explanation
Answer: D - Ending grandfather clauses had the unintended consequence of disenfranchising many poor, white, predominantly Southern voters who could not pass literacy tests but were previously able to vote due to a grandfather clause. In 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court case Guinn v. the United States ended the use of grandfather clauses as a substitution for passing literacy tests. Once all voters had to submit to a literacy test in order to vote, many poor, white Southern sharecroppers could not pass the test and did not have the grandfather clause to fall back on.
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