This election marked the beginning of the disfranchisement of African Americans in South Carolina. The process was gradual, and it took about two decades for near-total disfranchisement to occur.[1] By 1882, the Democrats were firmly in power in South Carolina. Republican voters were mostly limited to the majority-black counties of Beaufort and Georgetown. Because the state had a large black-majority population (nearly sixty percent in 1890), white Democrats had narrow margins in many counties and feared a possible resurgence of black Republican voters at the polls. To remove the black threat, the General Assembly created an indirect literacy test, called the "Eight Box Law".[1]
The law required a separate box for ballots for each office; a voter had to insert the ballot into the corresponding box or it would not count. The ballots could not have party symbols on them. They had to be of the correct size and type of paper. Many ballots were arbitrarily rejected because they slightly deviated from the requirements. Ballots could also randomly be rejected if there were more ballots in a box than registered voters.[2]
Results
1884 United States presidential election in South Carolina[3]
1 2 Rogers, George C. and C. James Taylor Jr. (1994). A South Carolina Chronology 1497–1992. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN978-0-87249-971-3.
↑ Holt, Thomas (1979). Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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