Rutherford B. Hayes Quotes

A clueless electorate is a corruptible one …

Until the Negro votes on a large scale, we will have to rely more and more on mass direct action as the one realistic political weapon.

… we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American voter-turnout machine.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

As an organizer in the most underrepresented communities in my state, I have felt the frustration that so many voters must feel when other states limit polling locations, require photo IDs, and put unnecessary barriers in front of voters.

It is clear that the photo ID requirement is not a solution to a problem but is instead a political ploy to prevent traditionally disenfranchised populations from voting for the candidates of their choice.

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

I don't think everyone should vote. If you have to be dragged into the polls, carried into the polls and smelling salts have to be used, you probably shouldn't be voting. However, we shouldn't be putting up barriers to voting that target certain groups.

Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.

I try hard to convince them it's important - but there's a history of discomfort with minorities voting in some parts of this country, so most especially the older people have to get accustomed to it.

In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.

Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.

Voting is a Constitutional right. Absent any evidence of fraud, all Americans have a protected right to vote, be they rich or poor, black, Hispanic or white, people who live in a big city or in remote rural areas.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

We have no standard by which to measure the disaster that may be brought upon us by ignorance and vice in the citizens when joined to corruption and fraud in the suffrage.

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

We'll get out the [black] vote, but we need the white vote to win.

Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, was a bad guy.

The voting business in the South will regulate itself.

The Voting Rights Act is a voter protection act, not a candidate or incumbent protection act.

Mr. Chairman, I am from the South, and I never knew a Republican was white until I was twenty-one years old.

The marked decrease in the average vote for congressmen in the South, from 1892 to 1902, is due primarily to the limitations upon the suffrage, and that these limitations were intended to eliminate the negro vote.

Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man from voting when he is unfit to vote.

We find that fraud in election is an old ulcer … it is too old, it is too malignant, to warrant any generous surgery. We have got to cut it out if healthy flesh comes with it. If we do disfranchise now and then an honest elector it is really for his own benefit and the benefit of his own State and county.

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.