Photography courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
When Sara Cardy sat down with voter registrar Delma Ross at Hickey Middle School in 1985, the Voting Rights Act was only 20 years old. The year before, when key parts were set to expire, politicians fought to rewrite it to put the burden on the voter to prove discrimination. That didn’t happen—at least not for another 29 years. But suppression began long before someone faced an election judge demanding a driver’s license and a passport. Roll purges, non–ADA-compliant polling places, and fines were among other hurdles. In the days when we shouted “Aye!” it was hard to detach the vote from the voter. Then we pulled levers and later filled in bubbles with a pen. “Today, most of our voting is done on computerized machines,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in a 1984 kids’ column. “The computers will not only tell us how the voting went in this area, but how it is going in the rest of the states. What kinds of problems do we have now with our voting machines that might be eliminated by then?” Today, talk about voting concerns continues, but another machine helps spread the word on Election Day: your phone, held at a just-so angle to capture your “I Voted” sticker.
