As we get closer toward election, I read the controversy about election fraud taking place and recall my experience with voting in five different Texas counties over my lifetime.
In each of the voting places I encountered similar type administrators who were working as a public service and took their job seriously using great pains to ensure each procedure and question were properly performed.
Generally, in a presidential election we are lucky if 55% of eligible voters actually vote. In Texas in order to exclude minorities and poor whites from voting we had what is called a poll tax from 1902 to 1964 that was $1.75 per person which was the equivalent to $65 today. Imagine today that a couple had to pay $130 each year in order to vote. I remember my mother and father discussing the burden of spending this money when working wages were 75¢ per hour. In the deep South instead of the poll tax reading tests and violence were used to keep minorities from voting.
