Trump Court Pick Once Called For Bringing Back Literacy Tests For Voters

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Source: Huff Post

May 27, 2025, 03:24 PM EDT | Updated 10 hours ago


WASHINGTON — One of President Donald Trump’s nominees to a federal judgeship, Josh Divine, argued in a college opinion piece that people should be required to take literacy tests in order to vote — despite such tests being outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they were routinely used to keep Black people from voting.

“People who aren’t informed about issues or platforms — especially when it is so easy to become informed these days — have no business voting, which is why I propose state-administered literacy tests,” Divine wrote in October 2010 in The Mirror, a publication of the University of Northern Colorado. At the time, he was a junior at the university.

“In the Civil Rights Act, literacy tests were banned because they were used as a form of discrimination in that they were only administered to certain groups of people,” he said, “but literacy tests themselves are not a bad thing.” Here’s a copy of Divine’s column:


Josh Divine, one of President Donald Trump's judicial picks, argued for bringing back literacy tests for elections in a 2010 opinion piece he published in college.The Mirror

Literacy tests in elections have a long and ugly history in the U.S. They were used from the late 1800s to the mid-1960s to prevent voting by immigrants and lower-income people, who were considered not educated enough to vote. In particular, in the 1960s, Southern states forced Black residents to explain complicated constitutional provisions in order to vote. The landmark Voting Rights Act ultimately banned literacy tests, along with poll taxes, and the result was a surge in registered Black voters.



Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-court-pick-josh-divine-literacy-tests_n_6835e04ae4b0620c4725eae3