The expansion of the franchise (the right to vote) has been a topic of controversy since the nation’s inception. Over time, the public’s role in the electoral process has been both expanded and limited by various political reforms. The first attempts to give the public a greater role in the electoral process focused on the Electoral College. The Constitution grants the Electoral College the right to select the president of the United States (except in cases of an Electoral College tie), but states were free to use any means they desired to select their electors. Most states permitted state legislatures to select their electors, rather than relying on a popular vote.
The problems that surfaced in the Campaign of 1824 challenged these traditional practices. In this election, Andrew Jackson, running under the Democratic-Republican label, built a strong base of popular support. Jackson was running against John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, all of whom were using a variant of the Democratic-Republican label. At the time, eighteen states had begun using the popular vote to select their presidential electors, while six continued to let state legislatures assign their electors. One hundred and thirty-one electoral votes were necessary to win the election. Jackson had ninety-nine electoral votes (and 43.1% of the popular vote), Adams had eighty-four electoral votes (and 30.5% of the popular vote), Crawford had forty-one electoral votes (and 13.2% of the popular vote), and Clay had thirty-seven electoral votes (and 13.1% of the popular vote). As dictated by the Constitution, the House of Representatives was tasked with deciding the outcome of the election. Each state received a single vote, which they could cast for one of the top three vote earners. Clay, who came in fourth, threw his support behind Adams, who was ultimately selected by the House. In exchange, Adams appointed Clay to his cabinet. Jackson’s supporters accused Adams and Clay of striking a “corrupt bargain,” which fueled efforts by Jackson’s supporters to expand the role of the public in the electoral process.
By the Campaign of 1828, the old King Caucus system, which relied on informal Congressional delegations gathered for the selection of presidential candidates, had ended. There were no informal nominating Congressional caucuses in the selection of the incumbent; rather, President Adams was nominated by the National Republicans through independent endorsements by state legislatures and party meetings. Jackson was again nominated by the Democratic-Republicans in a similar fashion (Jackson having been nominated to run again by the Tennessee state legislature as early as 1825, just a few months after President Adams’s inauguration). Jackson handily won the election, dislodging the president by winning most regions outside of the Northeast. During the Jacksonian era, the proportion of states that required property ownership for voter eligibility and (by 1855) the majority of states that had required that voters be taxpayers had eliminated such restrictions. The elimination of property requirements in Virginia and North Carolina during this era increased the electorates of those states by more than 50 percent, and in New York, the electorate increased by an even greater percentage. Political historians estimate that this expansion of the franchise led to voting-eligible turnout rates of near 80 percent by the middle of the nineteenth century.
During this same era, many states that had not originally restricted voting to whites only began to do so, and states also began limiting voting to U.S. citizens (whereas previously, one needed only to be a resident of the state to vote). States also moved to restrict voting by Native Americans, and they were aided in this endeavor by Chief Justice Marshall, who claimed that Native American groups were “domestic, dependent nations.” In short, Native Americans were not viewed as American citizens, and thus they had no right to participate in the American electoral process. While the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 officially recognized Native Americans as U.S. citizens, many state constitutions continued to limit Native American political participation until 1948.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments formally gave African Americans the right to vote, and the presence of federal troops in southern states during Reconstruction protected this right, for a time. When Reconstruction ended, states quickly moved to pass Jim Crow laws, which were designed to limit African American participation in elections (as well as other nonwhite groups). It was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the federal government offered real protections to African Americans seeking to register and vote in federal elections.
Asian Americans, who had historically come to the United States to construct the railroads, were also objects of suspicion in the political arena. Like African Americans, they were viewed as a source of cheap labor, but many Americans had no desire to extend political rights to Asian immigrants. A series of federal laws, beginning in 1882, severely limited the ability of Chinese and Japanese persons to immigrate to the United States and prevented them from applying for citizenship once they arrived. An assortment of alien land laws passed in the 1910s and 1920s barred Asians from owning land. It was not until the Magnuson Act of 1943 that persons of Chinese origin were eligible to become citizens. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated ethnic quotas for immigration to the United States and permitted Asian citizens to sponsor the immigration of family members to the United States.
While some territories and municipalities offered women the right to vote as early as the nineteenth century, women generally were not permitted to vote in federal elections. Numerous third parties (Greenbacks, Socialists, Bull Moose) backed women’s suffrage, some as early as the 1800s; however, the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920. Similarly, some states permitted younger Americans to vote prior to the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, although eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds across the nation gained federal voting rights in 1971. Still, other restrictions on the franchise remained. In Dunn v. Blumstein in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee’s residency requirement was excessive. This effectively forced all states to limit the amount of time a voter must live in a state prior to being able to vote. It is now the norm for states to require a residency period of thirty days prior to voter registration (and registration deadlines are generally no earlier than thirty days prior to an election).
Overall, the history of voting for nonwhites in the United States has been one of exclusion; for centuries, laws regulating citizenship, access to property, poll taxes, arbitrary implementation of literacy and morals standards, and even threats and intimidation were used to keep these groups from voting, even when they appeared to have a legal right to do so. The numerous changes that occurred in the 1960s served to change the population of the United States in profound ways. The electorate became more diverse, both ethnically and socioeconomically. With the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, coinciding with the passage of the baby boom generation into adulthood, it also became younger (at least theoretically).
One of the remaining restrictions on access to the franchise is the laws that limit political participation by convicted felons. While the Constitution does not prohibit voting (or office holding) by felons, most states limit voting by individuals who have been convicted of a crime. Only two states (Vermont and Maine) do not limit the voting rights of felons. Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia restore voting rights automatically after a person is released from prison. Nineteen states require that felons complete their prison time, plus probation time on parole, before their voting rights are restored. Eleven states (primarily in the South and the West) permanently disenfranchise some portion of the felon population. Virginia and Kentucky have had the strictest rules, permanently disenfranchising all felons (although individuals may appeal to the governor to restore their rights), and they have been joined by Florida and Iowa. As Michelle Alexander points out, such rules are another way to limit political participation by persons of color. She finds that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, particularly for drug-related crimes, and that they are far more likely than whites to be convicted and imprisoned for similar offenses. This disparity has both social and political consequences, and it tends to serve the same function as the Jim Crow laws of the twentieth century did—to permanently disenfranchise many people of color and relegate them to an economic and social underclass.
While there are few remaining restrictions on who is eligible to vote in the United States, political scientists have found that registration requirements and deadlines serve as one of the primary barriers in preventing many eligible Americans from casting a ballot. In an attempt to lower such barriers to voting, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. This law requires that states allow citizens to register to vote when they are obtaining a driver’s license or state identification card, or when receiving a federal service, and provides several other options for registering that do not require that the voter show up in person. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 permits voters the option of casting a provisional ballot if the state has mishandled a voter’s registration form. And several states have adopted Election Day registration to permit voters to register at the same time they cast a ballot. States also began to provide early voting opportunities, and more states offered no-excuse absentee ballots. Voter turnout surged in the Campaign of 2004 and the Campaign of 2008, partly as a result of these reforms.
Some states have also attempted to lower the barriers to voting on their own, by offering Election Day registration (CO, CT, DC, ID, IL, IA, ME, MN, MT, NH, VY, WI, WY) or by eliminating the registration process altogether (ND), so that citizens need not plan in advance to vote. Vermont will have Election Day registration (EDR) in place by the Campaign of 2016, and California and Vermont will enact EDR in a subsequent election. Since 1998, Oregon has conducted all of its elections entirely by mail, sending each of its registered voters a ballot by mail several weeks before the election. This eliminates the need for voters to find their polling place and to allocate time to vote on Election Day. In March 2015, Oregon became the first state to implement automatic voter registration, whereby the state assumed responsibility for registering all eligible voters upon their eighteenth birthday. States with Election Day registration, as well as states such as Oregon that lower the barriers to voting in other ways, consistently demonstrate higher levels of voter turnout than do other states.
More recently, though, many states have been moving in the other direction, seeking to make both registration and voting more difficult. After the 2010 midterms, the Republican Party gained or solidified their control of many state legislative chambers. While the GOP had historically supported attempts to expand the franchise, the Tea Party faction of the GOP did not share this view. They feared that continued high turnout of young voters, minority voters, and poor voters would make it difficult for their party to regain the White House in 2012. At the urging of their Tea Party members, these GOP-dominated legislatures engaged in the first major effort in decades to limit the size of the eligible electorate, rather than to expand it. The rationale offered for these “reforms” was that they were necessary to prevent voter fraud.
By the Campaign of 2012, nine states created more stringent photo identification requirements for voter identification at the polls, and three states passed laws requiring proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. Five states dramatically reduced the time period allotted for early voting; as part of this process, both Florida and Ohio eliminated the Sunday prior to Election Day commonly used by African Americans and Latinos. Six states made it harder for citizens to register to vote, including restrictions on voter registration drives. Ironically, these restrictions on voter registration drives came back to haunt the GOP, particularly in Florida. Both parties had long relied on the League of Women Voters (LWV) and other groups that had traditionally conducted nonpartisan voter registration in the state (free of charge). In 2012, LWV refused to register voters in Florida, not wanting to navigate the onerous new state regulations or incur the draconian penalties. This disproportionately hampered the GOP, which had not devoted many resources to mobilization. Democrats, on the other hand, already had a successful in-house voter mobilization strategy in Florida that they had used in 2008 and had not yet dismantled.
In the aftermath of the 2012 election, the voting rights landscape changed dramatically. The Supreme Court ruled Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act invalid in Shelby County v. Holder, rejecting the formula used to subject states with a history of voter discrimination to preclearance by the Justice Department prior to making any changes in their electoral laws. While the Voting Rights Act remained intact, states that were previously subject to federal oversight were now free to pass whatever electoral or voting restrictions they liked, and citizens would have to petition the courts and demonstrate that they were being harmed by the new policy. Rather than the burden being on the state to show that its proposed policies would not be harmful, the burden was now on the citizen to show that they were. Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama proceeded with restrictive voter identification laws in the aftermath of Shelby. Other states have followed suit. The Maine legislature repealed its state’s Election Day registration policy after the 2012 election, although voters reinstated it through a referendum in the fall of 2013.
In the summer of 2015, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Texas’s voter identification law, ruling that it unfairly discriminated against African Americans and Latinos, in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Texas is appealing the decision. North Carolina and Wisconsin also have challenges to their voter identification laws that are winding their way through the federal courts.
While the rationale for voter identification laws is that they combat fraud, the evidence that they are effective in this endeavor is negligible, for a variety of reasons. First, rates of documented voter fraud in the United States are quite rare. News21, a Carnegie-Knight-funded investigative project, evaluated public records and claims of fraud in all fifty states since 2000. It documented 2,000 instances of improper ballots cast (out of 146 million votes cast), most of them absentee, or occurring as a result of error (by the clerk, or by voters confused about their eligibility). Moreover, in-person voter fraud is extremely uncommon—the News21 investigation documented ten cases total across twelve years and fifty states (less than one instance per year nationwide). When voter fraud does occur, it is most likely to occur with absentee ballots, or by tampering with ballots that have already been cast. Voter identification laws tend to address in-person voting only, and thus they provide no protection for fraudulent use of absentee ballots—the easiest type of fraud to commit. And they do not address more systemic instances of fraud, where ballots are tampered with by someone other than the voter (e.g., postal employees, election officials). Nor do such laws appear to protect the perceived integrity of the electoral process. Ansolabehere and Persily examined citizens’ perceptions of ballot integrity in states with strict voter identification laws and contrasted them with views of citizens who lived in states without such laws. They found that views of fraud did not vary by electoral environment; citizens in states with strict laws did not view their electoral system as being fairer or safer from fraud. Rather, Ansolabehere and Persily found that the partisanship of the citizen and the party in power influenced perceptions of fairness. Citizens believe the electoral process is fair when their side wins an election, and they view the process as unfair when their side loses. Thus, fears of stolen elections are, essentially, rationalizations for electoral defeat.
Aside from their symbolic effects, though, voter identification laws can materially influence the cost of a citizen’s participation, and thus, opponents have argued that they will drive down voter turnout of economically disadvantaged groups. The Government Accounting Office conducted a study on the effects of strict voter identification laws on voter turnout. They found that when they examined Kansas and Tennessee from 2008 to 2012, when both states had toughened up their identification laws substantially, compared to a group of control states that had not changed their laws during this period (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Maine) but otherwise had similar traits in terms of electoral competitiveness and other factors, the new laws did influence turnout. In Kansas, turnout dropped by 1.9 to 2.2 percentage points, and in Tennessee, it dropped by 2.2 to 3.2 percentage points. Moreover, the drop in turnout was not distributed evenly across the population; turnout was down far more among voters aged eighteen to twenty-three than it was among voters aged forty-four to fifty-three, turnout was down far more among voters who had been registered for a year or less than it was among voters who had been registered twenty years or more, and turnout was down among African Americans far more than it was among whites (with inconsistent patterns among other ethnic groups, who did not appear in large numbers in these states).
Voting reform promises to be a popular topic in the Campaign of 2016, in part because many of the Democratic candidates have made it a cornerstone of their agendas. Bernie Sanders is campaigning on a bill he introduced to make Election Day a national holiday, and he has proposed a constitutional amendment to preclude the kind of unlimited election spending by outside groups that the Supreme Court allowed in Citizens United. President Barack Obama has advocated a national system of automatic registration, which has been embraced by all of the Democratic Party hopefuls. Hillary Clinton has made voting rights a central theme of her campaign, advocating a mandatory minimum of twenty days of early voting in all states, automatic voter registration (with an opt-out feature), automatic updates to voter registration, online voter registration, more opportunities for felon re-enfranchisement, and strengthening the Voting Rights Act. Several of the GOP hopefuls are associated with efforts to enact more stringent voter identification requirements (Walker, Kasich, Perry) or have expressed support for such requirements (Rubio, Graham). Both Cruz and Paul have expressed opposition to the Voting Rights Act. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, brother of Republican presidential nominee and eventual winner of the 2000 general election, George W. Bush, presided over the notorious 2000 presidential election in which over ten thousand eligible voters, most of them African American and Latino, were purged from the electoral rolls for being suspected felons. It appears likely that there will be little partisan agreement on the topic of voter registration or voter identification.
There is one area, however, where the parties appear to be in agreement: online voter registration. The option was uncommon in 2008, with only two states providing voters the opportunity to complete the voter registration process online. By 2016, twenty-two states and the District of Columbia will permit voters to register online. The ideological makeup of the states that allow online registration is diverse, providing the only glimmer of bipartisanship on a topic that is growing increasingly partisan and polarized.
See also Civil Rights Issue; Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) Programs; Jim Crow Laws; Voting Eligible Population (VEP) Turnout; Voting Rights Act of 1965; Women’s Rights Issue
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. Revised ed. New York: The New Press, 2011.
American Civil Liberties Union. “Timeline: Voting Rights Act.” http://www.aclu.org/voting-rights/voting-rights-act-timeline. Accessed October 13, 2015.
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Nathaniel Persily. “Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder: The Role of Public Opinion in the Challenge to Voter Identification Requirements.” Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 08-170, February 21, 2008.
Berman, Ari. “The GOP War on Voting.” Rolling Stone, August 30, 2011.
Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Brennan Center, New York University School of Law. “Voting Rights and Elections.” http://www.brennancenter.org/content/section/category/voting_rights_elections/. Accessed October 13, 2015.
Government Accounting Office. “Elections: Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws,” GAO-14-634, September 2014 (revised February 27, 2015).
Keyssar, Alexander. “The Strange Career of Voter Suppression.” New York Times, February 12, 2012.
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
News21. “Who Can Vote.” http://votingrights.news21.com/. Accessed October 13, 2015.