The History of Voting Restrictions and Expanding Suffrage
The History of Voting Restrictions and Expanding Suffrage
The vote is one of the most elementary—and important—forms of citizen participation in self-government. Voting is a key way for individuals to express consent to the government, participate in deliberation about the laws, and select representatives in republican forms of government.
The colonial era established important precedents for suffrage in the United States. While overall voting rates were very low for the entire population by today’s standards, they were comparatively high for their time, when most of the world was governed by monarchy, aristocracy, and despotism. Almost all of those who were eligible to vote did so.
In the colonial era, voting was generally limited to male property owners because property was understood to show a person’s independence and a stake in the community. Voting rates for white males were fairly high. In some places, 30–40% of the white male population could vote, and in other areas, 70–80% could vote. This meant they could express their consent through representatives in colonial legislatures and participate in local town meetings and offices.
A broad swath of the population, though, usually did not have the right of suffrage and could not express their consent to the government. Free Black males who owned property, women who owned property, and even Native Americans could vote in certain areas, but they were exceptions to the rule that only propertied men could vote in most places. The reasoning of the time was that women, enslaved Blacks, propertyless white males, and children were dependent upon others. Therefore, they did not have enough of a stake in the public life of the community to merit their own votes. In addition, members of some other groups, such as Catholics and Jews, suffered discriminatory religious restrictions that prevented them from voting.
In the wake of the American Revolution, states dropped property restrictions on white males in the early 1800s. This coincided with the growth of political parties (Democrats and Whigs) as the second party system developed. Party organizations developed and matured. Parties became adept at using rallies, picnics, and newspapers to stir popular enthusiasm and political participation. Eligible voters came to the polls in record numbers. This was an age of expanding democracy, realized in universal white male suffrage.
During this time, a ferment of social reform led to numerous movements to improve civic life. Women participated in several of the reform movements and began to organize for female suffrage. At several conventions such as Seneca Falls in 1848 and local-level meetings, women argued that they deserved equality to vote to express their consent at the ballot box and thereby participate formally in American democracy. Women would adopt strategies and organize campaigns at the national level and in the states over the next few decades as they fought for the right to vote.
After the Civil War, the Reconstruction amendments made fundamental changes for Blacks in American civic life. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) forever banned slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted national citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States regardless of race. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed that the right to vote could not be abridged based upon race or previous enslavement. Effectively, the Fifteenth Amendment protected the right of Black males, not women, to vote. As a result, many white suffragettes opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because they believed themselves to be more deserving of suffrage than Black males. Nevertheless, Black men won the right to vote, participated in elections, and served in Congress and state legislatures.
During Reconstruction and segregation in the late nineteenth century, white supremacists, especially in the South, systematically used a variety of devices to deny Blacks their constitutional right to vote. Blacks suffered intimidation and violence on election days. Grandfather clauses prevented anyone whose ancestor was enslaved from voting. Southern towns and states imposed poll taxes that many Blacks (and some whites) who were poor sharecropper farmers could not afford to pay. Southern states also made literacy tests a prerequisite for voting, and not many Black men could pass those tests because they had been prevented from learning to read during slavery. Due to restrictions upon them because of their race, Blacks were largely unable to register and vote, and were only able to do so in abysmally low numbers for decades.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were more successful in winning the right to vote. Beginning with Wyoming in 1869, a number of western territories and states—such as Utah, Colorado, and Idaho—gave women the right to vote. In the early twentieth century, suffragette demonstrations pressured Congress and President Woodrow Wilson to support a woman suffrage amendment during World War I. Women received the constitutional right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement organized demonstrations against segregation and voting restrictions in the South. In 1964, Blacks, white liberals, and college students sought to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi—and faced a wave of horrific violence in response—during the Freedom Summer campaign. The following year, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders suffered violence on Bloody Sunday during the attempted Selma march. The images of violence broadcast to the country on television shocked the nation and Congress into action with the Voting Rights Act (1965), which outlawed race discrimination in all aspects of voting including registration barriers such as literacy tests. Black registration and voting totals have shown steady gains in the wake of the federal law.
Only a few years later, 18-year-olds won the right to vote with the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. During World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, 18-year-old males were eligible for the military draft but could not vote. “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” became a common refrain. In 1971, the requisite number of states ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, protecting the right to vote beginning at age 18. While they have generally had the lowest voting rates out of the eligible age cohorts, young people have participated in greater numbers, such as in 2008 when many came to the polls to vote for Barack Obama.
The history of suffrage in the United States has involved a gradual expansion of the vote, granting more citizens the right to participate in self-government. More Americans over time have been able to express their consent to the laws that they live under, thereby enjoying greater equality and justice as citizens.