A bachelor without kids, Morris Kramer still lived in his parents’ New York home at 31 years old.
Perhaps not the most likely profile of someone who would go on to change voting rights across the nation. But that’s exactly what the young stockbroker pulled off.
How?
Read on…
Because Morris Kramer neither owned nor leased property, nor sent kids to the local school district, New York law at the time deemed him ineligible to vote in local school district elections. But apparently, Kramer was eager to vote in school district elections—so eager that he challenged his exclusion all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
And three years after Harper (which ended poll taxes in America) raised the level of scrutiny on curbs on voting, Kramer’s challenge would ratchet the bar up even higher. In fact, the way that the Court applied the “strict scrutiny” standard in Kramer v. Union Free School District (1969) would make it nearly impossible for governments of the future to eliminate any class of citizens from participating in American elections.
Kramer Drops the Hammer: “Strict in theory, fatal in fact”…
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