Orser67
Junior Chimp
Posts: 5,947
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« on: August 10, 2022, 03:38:35 PM » |
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Agreed with other posters about suppression of the black vote and the lack of the secret ballot being major causes. I'd assume there was also a bit of a vicious cycle going on in terms of Republicans not bothering to vote.
It's also somewhat instructive to look historical vote totals. In 1876, Hayes narrowly carried South Carolina over Tilden, as both received about half of the ~182k votes cast. By 1884, after Democrats had regained over the state, total voter turnout fell to around 90k. In 1936, FDR won 98.5% of the 115k total votes. So South Carolina cast about 1.5x the number of votes in 1876 as it did in 1936, despite the passage of the 19th Amendment, and despite the fact that the state population grew from around 1 million in 1880 to 1.7 million in 1930.
South Carolina's total number of votes cast grew to over 300k in 1952 after South Carolina implemented a secret ballot (ironically, it was signed into law by Strom Thurmond) and repealed the poll tax. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, South Carolina cast over 650k votes in the 1968 presidential election.
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