U.S. VOTING HISTORY

U.S. Constitution and state laws

Though all 12 states allowed some rudimentary form of popular vote, only six ratifying states allowed any form of popular vote specifically for Presidential electors. In most states only white men, and in many only those who owned property, could vote. Free black men could vote in four Northern states, and women could vote in New Jersey, if they owned property, until 1807. In some states, there was a nominal religious test for voting. Voting was hampered by poor communications and infrastructure and the labor demands imposed by farming. Two months passed after the presidential election before the votes were counted and Washington was notified that he had been elected President. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788%E2%80%9389_United_States_presidential_election

Last state abolishes property requirements

In 1856, North Carolina is the last state to abolish property qualifications for white men to vote. However, most older states with property restrictions dropped them by the mid-1820s except for Rhode Island, Virginia, and North Carolina. No new states had property qualifications although three had adopted tax-paying qualifications - Ohio, Louisian, and Mississippi, of which only in Louisiana were these significant and long-lasting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_the_United_States

The 15th Amendment states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But Jim Crow laws are upheld by Supreme Court.

The 15th Amendment granting African-American men the right to vote was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, by the late 1870s discriminatory practices were used to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied African-Americans their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

In the late 1870s, the Southern Republican Party vanished with the end of Reconstruction, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (passed in 1868, it guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to African Americans) and the 15th amendment, stripping blacks in the South of the right to vote.

In the ensuing decades, various discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests—along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation and outright violence—were used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fifteenth-amendment

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.

The U.S. Supreme Court on this day in 1896 upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana law mandating “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on railroad trains. The ruling upheld racial segregation on the federal level for the first time. In its 7-1 decision, the high tribunal struck a major blow against racial integration. Known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the ruling stood until May 17, 1954 when it was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner from Kentucky, filed a scathing dissent. “The white race,” he wrote, “deems itself to be the dominant race,” but the Constitution recognizes “no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. Our Constitution is color-blind ... In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law.” In 1892, Homer Plessy had boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad that was reserved for whites. Although Plessy was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, he was required to travel in a “colored” car. When Plessy refused to move, he was arrested and jailed. He argued that the railroad had denied him his rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments of the Constitution. But the judge, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the sole right to regulate railroad companies operating within state boundaries.

After the high court upheld Ferguson, the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens, which had arranged Plessy’s demonstration and brought the lawsuit, said, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.” In a speech delivered in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1886 and later published as The Black Laws, legislator Benjamin Arnett described life in segregated Ohio: “I have traveled in this free country for 20 hours without anything to eat; not because I had no money to pay for it, but because I was colored. Other passengers of a lighter hue had breakfast, dinner and supper. In traveling we are thrown in ‘Jim Crow’ cars, denied the privilege of buying a berth in the sleeping coach.”

SOURCE: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; “SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL: HOMER PLESSY AND THE SUPREME COURT DECISION THAT LEGALIZED RACISM,” BY HARVEY FIRESIDE (2004)

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19th Amendment

1920 began with the last American troops returning from Europe after World War I and 1920 kicked off an era of change becoming the only decade in American history with a nickname - “The Roaring Twenties.”  It was the only year since the Bill of Rights that the constitution was amended twice.  The 18th Amendment prohibited alcohol in the U.S. and the 19h Amendment granted women the right to vote. 

The last “yes” vote needed for ratification was provided on August 18, 1920, in the Tennessee House of Representatives passed in favor of the amendment by a vote of 50-49.  It was a nail biter!! Many other notable events took place in 1920 but the suffrage movement, which included three generations of suffragists fighting long and hard, finally crossed that finish line giving women that right to vote.   

(this info found in a book written by Eric Burns, 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar)

The Magnuson Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943, was an immigration legislation proposed by U.S. Representative (later Senator) Warren G. Magnuson of Washington and signed into law on December 17, 1943 in the United States. It allowed Chinese immigration for the first time since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and permitted some Chinese immigrants already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens. However, the Magnuson Act provided for the continuation of the ban against the ownership of property and businesses by ethnic Chinese. In many states, Chinese Americans (including US citizens) were denied property-ownership rights either by law or de facto until the Magnuson Act itself was fully repealed in 1965.

DR. MABEL PING-HUA LEE

Mabel Lee was born in Guangzhou (Canton), not far from Hong Kong in China in 1896. When she was 4, her father moved to the US to serve as a missionary. Lee remained in Hong Kong and lived with her mother and grandmother. She learned English at a missionary school and won a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. This academic scholarship granted her a US visa and the Lee family settled in New York City's Chinatown in 1905. Mabel attended Erasmus Hall Academy in Brooklyn.By the time she was 16, Mabel Lee was a known figure in New York’s suffrage movement. New York City suffragists held a parade in 1912 to advocate for women’s voting rights. Ten thousand people attended the parade. Lee, on horseback, helped lead the parade from its starting point in Greenwich Village. 

— https://www.nps.gov/people/mabel-lee.htm

Last states grant voting rights to all Native Americans

Although Native Americans were legally named citizens of the United States in 1924, the road to the franchise was not an easy one. The right of Native Americans to vote in U.S. elections was recognized in 1948 with the landmark cases Harrison v. Laveen and Trujillo v. Garley. Even so, they were not eligible to vote in every state until 1962, when Utah became the last state to remove formal barriers.

But pernicious roadblocks remain to this day. Restrictive voting laws throughout the United States often carry a discriminatory effect, either by intent or consequence, for Native communities. Some of the major challenges to the ballot box faced by Native Americans include:

Restrictive voting laws that leave Native communities on the sidelines

The lack of proper allocation of election resources for Native communities

Removal of federal protections

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/state-native-american-voting-rights

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarren Walter Act) grants the right to citizenship and right to vote to all Asian Americans. It also upheld the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924, reinforcing this controversial system of immigrant selection.

It also ended Asian exclusion from immigrating to the United States and introduced a system of preferences based on skill sets and family reunification. Situated in the early years of the Cold War, the debate over the revision of U.S. immigration law demonstrated a division between those interested in the relationship between immigration and foreign policy, and those linking immigration to concerns over national security. The former group, led by individuals like Democrat Congressman from New York Emanuel Celler, favored the liberalization of immigration laws. Celler expressed concerns that the restrictive quota system heavily favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe and therefore created resentment against the United States in other parts of the world. He felt the law created the sense that Americans thought people from Eastern Europe as less desirable and people from Asia inferior to those of European descent. The latter group, led by Democratic Senator from Nevada Pat McCarran and Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania Francis Walter, expressed concerns that the United States could face communist infiltration through immigration and that unassimilated aliens could threaten the foundations of American life. To these individuals, limited and selective immigration was the best way to ensure the preservation of national security and national interests.

Remarkably, economic factors were relatively unimportant in the debate over the new immigration provisions. Although past arguments in favor of restrictionism focused on the needs of the American economy and labor force, in 1952, the Cold War seemed to take precedent in the discussion. Notably, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations took opposite sides in the debate, demonstrating that there was not one, clear pro-labor position.

At the basis of the Act was the continuation and codification of the National Origins Quota System. It revised the 1924 system to allow for national quotas at a rate of one-sixth of one percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1920. As a result, 85 percent of the 154,277 visas available annually were allotted to individuals of northern and western European lineage. The Act continued the practice of not including countries in the Western Hemisphere in the quota system, though it did introduce new length of residency requirements to qualify for quota-free entry.

The 1952 Act created symbolic opportunities for Asian immigration, though in reality it continued to discriminate against them. The law repealed the last of the existing measures to exclude Asian immigration, allotted each Asian nation a minimum quota of 100 visas each year, and eliminated laws preventing Asians from becoming naturalized American citizens. Breaking down the “Asiatic Barred Zone” was a step toward improving U.S. relations with Asian nations. At the same time, however, the new law only allotted new Asian quotas based on race, instead of nationality. An individual with one or more Asian parent, born anywhere in the world and possessing the citizenship of any nation, would be counted under the national quota of the Asian nation of his or her ethnicity or against a generic quota for the “Asian Pacific Triangle.” Low quota numbers and a uniquely racial construction for how to apply them ensured that total Asian immigration after 1952 would remain very limited.

There were other positive changes to the implementation of immigration policy in the 1952 Act. One was the creation of a system of preferences which served to help American consuls abroad prioritize visa applicants in countries with heavily oversubscribed quotas. Under the preference system, individuals with special skills or families already resident in the United States received precedence, a policy still in use today. Moreover, the Act gave non-quota status to alien husbands of American citizens (wives had been entering outside of the quota system for several years by 1952) and created a labor certification system, designed to prevent new immigrants from becoming unwanted competition for American laborers.

President Truman was concerned about the decisions to maintain the national origins quota system and to establish racially constructed quotas for Asian nations. He thought the new law was discriminatory, and he vetoed it, but the law had enough support in Congress to pass over his veto.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act

Voting Rights Act of 1965 protects voters nationwide

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Voting Rights Act is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

Selma to Montgomery March

Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency in November 1963 upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was officially elected in a landslide victory and used this mandate to push for legislation he believed would improve the American way of life, such as stronger voting-rights laws.

After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited states from denying a male citizen the right to vote based on “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades, various discriminatory practices were used to prevent African Americans, particularly those in the South, from exercising their right to vote.

During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, voting rights activists in the South were subjected to various forms of mistreatment and violence. One event that outraged many Americans occurred on March 7, 1965, when peaceful participants in a Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights were met by Alabama state troopers who attacked them with nightsticks, tear gas and whips after they refused to turn back.

Some protesters were severely beaten and bloodied, and others ran for their lives. The incident was captured on national television.

In the wake of the shocking incident, Johnson called for comprehensive voting rights legislation. In a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, the president outlined the devious ways in which election officials denied African-American citizens the vote.

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act

26th Amendment

On July 5, 1971, President Richard Nixon formally certified the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted 18 to 21 year olds the right to vote. Prior to this date , the voting age had been 21 in a majority of states, even though 18 year old were old enough to get married, work, and were expected to pay taxes. This was enacted in response to the Vietnam War protests due to the fact that the average age of U.S. soldiers was 19. The slogan, “Old enough to fight, old enough to die” gained popularity.

In 1971, Senator Jennings Randolph, a Democrat of West Virginia, proposed a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age and it unanimously passed the Senate.  In the House of Representatives only 19 out of 419 congressmen opposed it and it was sent to the states to be ratified.  It took  just 100 days to receive the necessary three-fourths majority of state ratification.  On  July 5, the 26th Amendment was formally adopted into the Constitution, adding 11 million potential voters to the electorate.  Half of these young  cast their ballot in the 1972 presidential election.

Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires that the states and territories allow certain groups of citizen to register and vote absentee in elections for Federal Offices. It includes members of the U.S. Uniformed Services and Merchant Marines, and the commissioned corps of the Public Health Services, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, their eligible family members; and U.S. citizens residing outside the United States. This Act provides the legal basis for these citizens’ absentee voting requirements for federal offices.

Supreme Court weakens Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was passed in 1965 to ensure that state and local governments do not deny American citizens the equal right to vote based on their race, color, or membership in a minority language group. This momentous piece of legislation enshrines the right of every citizen an equal opportunity to participate in our democracy.

But that right is under threat. In 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated a key provision of the VRA. Section 5 of the law required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain approval before changing voting rules. This process, known as “preclearance,” blocked discrimination before it occurred. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court invalidated Section 4 — which determines the states and localities covered by Section 5 — ruling Congress must pass a new formula to determine which states and localities would be subject to “preclearance.” The ruling had the effect of eliminating preclearance, ushering in a wave of efforts in states previously covered under Section 5 to restrict voting rights.

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/voting-reform/voting-rights-act

#restorethevote

The Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act

WHAT IS THE VOTING RIGHTS ADVANCEMENT ACT (VRAA)?

The Voting Rights advancement Act (VRAA) restores and modernizes the original protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). The goal of the legislation is to combat the influx of discriminatory voting requirements that states have enacted that disproportionately prevent minorities, the elderly, and youth from voting. 

The VRAA would: 

establish a targeted process for reviewing voting changes based on measures that have historically been used to discriminate against voters. The process for reviewing changes in voting is limited to a certain set of circumstances, such as establishing photo ID laws or reducing multilingual voting materials, which have been shown to have a discriminatory impact, 

increase transparency by requiring reasonable public notice for voting changes, and 

allow the Attorney General authority to request federal observers to be present anywhere in the country where a serious threat to voter access and fair elections exists.

The Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder (2013) invalidated the section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required certain states and local governments to obtain federal approval before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices if the states had a history of voting discrimination against racial, ethnic, and language minorities. The Court said the formula that determined which jurisdictions fall under federal oversight was out of date and instructed that it was on Congress to come up with a modern-day formula that protects voting rights. The Voting Rights Advancement Act accomplishes this by enacting voter protections for states with a record of suppressive voting practices over the last 25 years. 

House of Representative member Terri Sewell of Alabama introduced this bill and similar versions in every session of Congress since the Shelby County v. Holder decision.