The 54-mile trek was the catalyst for the federal Voting Rights Act, which was passed that same year. But the proportion of Selma's blacks who voted in this year's presidential election was strikingly low. But today many face a range of more mundane deterrents to the exercise of their most basic democratic right. The polls close at 6 p.m., making it hard for many workers to get there in time. Selma routinely confuses voters by assigning them to one precinct for municipal elections and another for county, state, and federal contests.
Some polling places are hard to get to without a car.
Just two months before the national election, Selma's voters overcame some of these hurdles, turning out en masse for the city's mayoral race. In Selma, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made a big push to encourage blacks to go to the polls. Some states with an increase in black voter turnout in the 2000 election. But those efforts ran up against the quirks of Selma's voting system. One was the fact that would-be voters in the presidential election were assigned to a different polling place than the one they went to for the mayoral election two months earlier.