Notes

New Mexico's Native Americans gained the right to vote in the late 1940s, and voter participation in elections has increased a great deal in the past 20 years.

African Americans also suffered from discrimination related to voting. Throughout the nation, African Americans held protests and campaigned for equality as part of the civil rights movement. By the mid-1960s, the U.S. federal government decided to act to help long-standing practices of racial discrimination. Although changes were mostly in response to African American demands for equality, they affected all non-white Americans.

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. This legislation outlawed racial discrimination and ended the practice of racial segregation common in the southern and western states, including New Mexico and Arizona. That same year, U.S. voters ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment, banning the use of poll taxes in federal elections. Poll taxes were those that voters had to pay before they could vote. Many African Americans could not afford to pay these taxes. The Supreme Court later applied the same restriction to state elections. The following year, Johnson signed a second law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ban other discriminatory practices that kept African Americans and other minorities from voting. The act banned the use of literacy tests, for example, as a basis for determining the right to vote