Even these brief international comparisons make clear that the basic forces shaping the history of suffrage in the United States were not unique: they were grounded in the realities of class and ethnic conflict in the increasingly industrial capitalist world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The American experience, to be sure, had several distinctive features: the early abolition of property requirements; the presence of slaves and afterward a large, repressed, and regionally concentrated racial minority; the scale of immigration and the facility with which immigrants could become citizens. Each of these features had a significant impact on the details and rhythms of the history of suffrage in the United States, particularly on the backsliding that marked the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So too did the federal structure of government in the United States, which permitted individual states to define their own electorates and, for both better and worse, allowed the national government to delay establishing national suffrage norms. Yet these distinctive features also interacted with broader currents—economic, social, and political—that were common to the Western world. Conflicts over the breadth of the right to vote have been nearly universal in the political life of modern nations for the past two centuries.
All of which brings us back to the fact that the story remains unfinished, incomplete. Although the formal right to vote is now nearly universal among citizens, it remains contested at the margins—and the margins are broad. As chronicled in the preceding chapter, millions of felons and ex-felons lack the franchise; the status of the cognitively impaired is uncertain; photo-ID requirements loom as a challenging obstacle to poor and elderly voters; access to the ballot box is too often politicized rather than automatic. Moreover, levels of participation in American elections remain relatively low, in comparison both to other nations and to our own past experience. For the last fifty years, only half of all eligible adults have voted in most presidential elections, while fewer (often far fewer) than 40 percent have cast ballots in other contests. Even in 2004 and 2008, when sharply fought presidential contests produced a surge in turnout to just over 60 percent, more people stayed home than voted for either presidential candidate.4
In theory, of course, nonvoting could be a sign of contentment, of a satisfied electorate. But portraits of the nonvoting population make this rosy interpretation difficult to sustain: turnout is lowest among the poor, minorities, and the less educated. In a pattern distinctively American, turnout correlates positively with social class: those with more education and higher incomes are far more likely to vote than are their less-advantaged fellow citizens. The people who are least likely to be content or complacent (and most likely to need government help) are those who are least likely to vote.5
Numerous factors have contributed to this low and class-skewed turnout (as long-enduring debates among political scientists have made clear). Yet it is striking—and likely not coincidental—that nonvoters come disproportionately from some of the same social groups that in earlier decades were the targets of restrictions on the franchise itself. The poor and less educated, often formally disfranchised in the past, still have the greatest difficulty overcoming procedural obstacles to registration and voting. Perhaps more important, the political institutions and culture that evolved during the era of restricted suffrage spawned a political system that generally offers few attractive choices to the nation’s least well-off citizens. The two major political parties tend to operate within a narrow, ideological spectrum; the programmatic differences between candidates often are difficult to discern; during the final decades of the twentieth century, the core social and economic policies of both parties were shaped largely by the desire to foster economic growth and therefore to satisfy the business and financial communities.6
The increasing institutionalization of the two-party system, moreover, has helped to keep the range of choices offered to the public quite narrow: rules governing ballot access limit the ability of dissident parties to mount national campaigns; public funding goes only to parties that already are established; and the persistence of winner-take-all elections and single-member districts makes it exceedingly difficult for new parties to gradually acquire influence, visibility, and strength. (Notably, the only third party to have made any headway in a recent presidential election—the Reform Party—had no distinctive ideology or program and was underwritten by an iconoclastic billionaire, Ross Perot.) Within this semi-closed system and with both parties gravitating towards the political center in election campaigns, the alternatives presented to voters have often seemed less than consequential. As Robert B. Reich, President Clinton’s former secretary of labor, concluded, “the great mass of non-voters . . . didn’t vote in 1996 because they saw nothing in it for them.” Only at occasional moments have the contrasts between political parties sharpened, and those moments—the 1930s, the mid-1960s, and the recent elections of 2004 and 2008—did bring more voters to the polls.7
Low levels of electoral turnout are not the only problem. As political scientist Sidney Verba and his colleagues have pointed out in an important study of civic voluntarism, voting is only one of several forms of political participation open to Americans and vital to the health of democracy. Other avenues of participation, however, such as volunteering time or contributing money, are even more class correlated: people with more money, more education, and middle-class skills are far more likely than working-class citizens to engage in all forms of political activism. As a result, the voices of the more privileged are heard more loudly in the halls of governance, and the ideal of democracy—that all voices be heard equally—is consistently undermined.8
Indeed, the raw and growing power of money in politics has served as a counterweight to the democratic thrust of the broadening of suffrage. Since the early twentieth century, critical governmental decisions have been made by regulatory commissions and agencies that are beyond the direct reach of electoral politics but accessible to well-funded, organized interest groups. Congressional committees and state legislatures hear not only the distant and diffuse voices of the electorate but the nearby and insistent voices of lobbyists who roam the corridors of power. Even institutions ostensibly insulated from public influence, such as the all-important Federal Reserve Board, have constituencies to which they listen, and these constituencies—as became glaringly evident during the first months of the financial crisis of 2008—are comprised largely of the wealthy and the well-positioned.9
In addition, the direct role of money in elections is enormous. Campaigns, waged largely on television, have become extraordinarily expensive, and candidates who cannot raise large war chests are commonly doomed to failure. The need to raise such sums has made candidates and parties increasingly dependent on the wealthy and on organized influence groups, who in turn exert a grossly disproportionate influence on candidates, their political parties, and the positions they espouse. Blue-collar workers and welfare recipients do not sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom or air their views with high-ranking officials at $10,000-a-plate dinners; they rarely get to testify before congressional committees either. Even the innovative Internet-based presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which raised funds from an unprecedented number of small donors, relied heavily on contributors who could give $1,000 or more. Moreover, the Obama campaign vividly demonstrated, in its final months, the great advantage of being able to outspend an opponent. If recent trends continue, the actual casting of ballots, in some elections at least, could be in danger of becoming a pro forma ritual serving only to ratify the selection of candidates who have already won the fund-raising contests.10
The current state of American politics and policy-making makes clear that universal suffrage is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a fully democratic political order. No political system can claim to be democratic without universal suffrage, but a broad franchise alone cannot guarantee to each citizen an equal voice in politics and governance. The arrangements and institutions that surround the conduct of elections—such as di
stricting, apportionment, the structure of representation (including the Electoral College), the financing of campaigns, the ability of parties to get on the ballot, and the procedural requirements for voting—all can promote or vitiate the equality of political rights. These institutions and rules often are contested, just as the right to vote itself was contested for a century and three-quarters.
The broad sweep of history suggests that such contestation is par for the course and that democracy ought not be imagined or understood as a static condition or a fixed set of rules and institutions; it may be more valuable—and accurate—to think instead of democracy as a project.11 One critical lesson of the history of suffrage in the United States and elsewhere is that modern societies always have contained individuals and social groups who oppose equal and universal political rights. In capitalist societies, there always have been private interests and centers of power that are or believe themselves to be threatened by democratic control of the state. In socially diverse nations, ethnic, racial, and religious antagonisms often have sparked the impulse to suppress or restrict the rights of minorities. Even individual issues have sometimes loomed so important that factions have sought to deny political voice to their adversaries. On the other hand, there always have been individuals and groups pressing in the opposite direction, for greater democratization and equality. As a result, the very structures and rules of electoral politics periodically become touchstones and lightning rods of conflict.
The history of suffrage, thus, should lead us to expect recurrent skirmishing once universal suffrage has been achieved. The effects of a restricted suffrage can be replicated, or at least approximated, by cleverly unequal districting or by complex registration requirements. Even if one-person, one-vote principles are applied to districting, regulations governing the access of parties to the ballot can influence the outcome of elections; so too can the design of electoral systems (e.g., majority versus plurality victors, or “winner take all” versus proportional representation) or the structure of campaign financing. As American political parties discovered long ago, changing the rules is one way to win.12
It would, alas, be utopian to expect that such conflicts will ever subside, that any tamperproof set of rules or institutions can be devised, that competing interests will not seek to alter electoral regulations, or that changing conditions will not recurrently create the need for new arrangements. History offers no examples of political institutions that can permanently guarantee genuine political equality. Democracy therefore must remain a project, a goal, something to be endlessly nurtured and reinforced, an ideal that cannot be fully realized but always can be pursued.
This notion of democracy as a project, as well as our own contested history of voting rights and electoral institutions, also ought to inform American efforts to encourage democratic regimes in nations with different political traditions and troubled recent pasts. The business of exporting democracy has been booming since the end of the cold war, and American experts and consultants have been dispatched throughout the globe to offer advice regarding the erection of new political institutions. The track record of such efforts has been (at best) mixed: blueprints drawn up in Washington do not necessarily fit foreign landscapes, and the holding of formally democratic elections does not guarantee a redistribution of power and influence. Military leaders, party bosses, business moguls, and even elected officials have been endlessly inventive at devising methods of circumventing or overriding procedural democracy. Our own history suggests that this ought not be a surprise: it is often easier to pay lip service to popular government than to live with its decisions. If Americans are to be involved at all in such international efforts (a major question in itself), and if our goal truly is to promote democracy—and not simply capitalism—we must recognize the real scope of the endeavor and be prepared to provide long-term support to those individuals and forces who will be struggling for popular government for some time to come.
At home too, there is, and always will be, much to be done. The ideal of democracy—that all individuals are not only born equal but remain equally worthy—surely is an admirable one. The principle that no person’s interests and needs are more important than those of anyone else—and thus that all individuals should have an equal chance of influencing government policy—seems well worth fighting for.13 The project of democracy has never been unanimously embraced in the United States, but it has animated and shaped a great deal of our history. For more than two centuries, men and women who were committed to that project have pressed it forward, despite ceaseless and sometimes violent opposition. The history of the right to vote is a record of the slow and fitful progress of the democratic project, of progress that was hard won and often subject to reverses. The gains so far achieved need to be protected, while a vision of a more democratic society can inspire both our hopes and our actions.
APPENDIX
State Suffrage Laws, 1775-1920
A Note on the Tables and Sources
The tables presented in this appendix represent an effort to assemble, as completely as possible, a factual skeleton of the evolution of suffrage in the United States. That no similar compilation exists anywhere in print is a remarkable fact—and the rationale for publishing these tables here.
Three limits to this collection should be noted. The first is that the tables deal largely with the years prior to 1920. This chronological limit was set because state laws changed relatively little between 1920 and 1950, federal law became paramount by the 1960s, and legal materials for the post-1920 period are more readily accessible in reference volumes. Second, this assembly does not include detailed presentations of all of the disfranchising laws passed in the South between 1890 and 1920; this is so because such presentations previously have been published in the work of other historians (cited in Chapter 4). Finally, this collection omits data regarding registration laws. This decision was made for reasons of feasibility: state voter registration laws for the last century generally have been complex, lengthy, and subject to frequent changes. A preliminary attempt to produce such a tabular presentation yielded an incomplete document more than fifty pages long.
The sources listed at the end of these tables are those in which constitutional provisions, statutes, and court cases mentioned in the tables were found. The list does not include the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of volumes (particularly of statutes) that were examined to confirm other sources or to find that no relevant laws were listed.
The procedures that yielded these tables were as follows. The first sources to be examined were the texts of all of the state constitutions that were ever in force between the American Revolution and the mid-twentieth century. These were supplemented by readings of all of the state constitutional conventions for which transcripts of the proceedings exist. Systematic studies of the statutes and case law then were conducted for a set of critical states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Less systematic but sometimes extensive research was undertaken for all other states. These efforts were complemented through the use of multistate compilations of the laws that were periodically put together either by scholars or (more commonly) by state officials and constitutional conventions preparing to revise their own laws.
In addition, a substantial secondary literature was consulted. One of the more chastening features of this research effort, however, was the discovery that much of the secondary literature was unreliable in details: inconsistencies and contradictions among secondary sources (and between secondary and primary sources) abounded. All problematic items in the secondary literature thus were treated simply as leads back into the state constitutions, codes, session laws, and court cases. Items are included in the tables only when they could be verified.
I am reasonably confident that these tables are comprehensive with respect to constitutional provisions: that is, they include all constitutional requirements (on the subjects examined) that were in force at an
y point during the period. Comprehensiveness with respect to statutes (as well as case law), however, is more difficult to achieve. In most states, some (usually minor) dimensions of suffrage law could be shaped by statutory provisions, court decisions, and even municipal regulations; some of these changes may well have escaped my notice, particularly for those states where the annual session laws were not exhaustively examined. Local residency requirements, for example, might have shifted back and forth without leaving an imprint on periodic codifications of a state’s laws; the same was true of laws permitting women to vote for school boards. It is, thus, possible that there are (presumably minor) errors of omission in some of the tables: this caution would apply primarily to tables A.10, A.11, A.13, A.15, and A.17 to A.19.
Finally, it should be noted that, in all of the tables, the dates accompanying particular legal provisions are the earliest dates on which I have found such provisions. Unless otherwise indicated, these laws remained in force for the duration of the period covered by each table.
TABLE A.1 Suffrage Requirements: 1776-1790
TABLE A.2 Property and Taxpaying Requirements for Suffrage: 1790-1855
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