Voting History Timeline
Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, asks the Continental Congress to support women's rights. John Adams ridicules her request and vows to fight the "Despotism of the petticoat."
Between the first Continental Congress in 1776 and adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the former English colonies organized into states, some of which barred Jews, Quakers, Catholics, and other "heretics" from voting or holding office.
The Delaware Constitution of 1776 stated that: "Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust was required to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."
South Carolina Constitution of 1778 stated that "No person shall be eligible to sit in the House of Representatives unless he be of the Protestant religion."
During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegates from states allowing slavery insisted that only white males be allowed to vote, while also demanding that enslaved persons be counted when determining how many members of Congress each state is entitled to. Representatives from non-slaveholding states argued that enslaved people cannot vote and should not be counted when determining the numbers of Congressional seats for each state. The Three Fifths Compromise required enslaved persons to be counted as 3/5 person for apportionment purposes.
By 1800, less than 5% of the nation’s population could vote, as almost all states restrict voting to White men, with most requiring the vote to those White men who own a certain amount of property.
After 1807, no state allowed women to vote. States including, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey, all had previously allowed women to vote. By 1807, these states rescind the right to vote for women.
The 1790 federal Naturalization Law stated that only "free white" immigrants could become naturalized citizens. "White" was defined as pure European ancestry, effectively barring from citizenship immigrants from anywhere other than Europe. In addition, the language also barred mixed-race immigrants even if they were from Europe.
Native-Americans considered "citizens" of their "sovereign" Indian "nations," were not considered citizens of the United States and therefore could not vote in state or federal elections.
Over a 68-year period Americans in various states struggled, sometimes violently, to remove the need to own property as a qualification to vote.
In 1828, the state of Maryland extended voting rights to Jewish Americans
After revolting from Mexico in 1836, the short-lived Republic of Texas denied citizenship to anyone who had not supported the Revolution against Mexico, including all non-Anglos.
After Texas is admitted to the United States of America as a slave-state, the federal government granted U. S. citizenship and property-rights to the Mexicans remaining in the newly formed state. In Texas, large landowners force their Mexican-American employees to vote as a group, typically for the land owner's preferred candidates. When Mexican-Americans tried to vote independently, they face beatings, burnings, and lynching.
In the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War, Mexicans remaining in the new territories were recognized as U.S. citizens. When California was admitted to the Union as a free-state in 1850, Mexican Americans, although technically U.S. citizens, were denied the vote through "voter eligibility" laws and violence. Other states carved out of former Mexican territory, including Arizona and New Mexico, also find ways to deny Mexican-Americans the right to vote.
In 1848, the first Woman's Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. Delegates demand that women be granted the right to vote in addition to all other rights afforded to United States citizens.
During the 72 years between the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, and passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, suffragettes agitated for the right to vote through protests, petitions, lobbying, law suits, marches, and by engaging in civil-disobedience. In their campaign for full citizenship, suffragettes endure assaults, mob attacks, rape and incarceration. Those resolute women were penalized with divorce and removal of children, seizure and destruction of property, in addition to forced-feeding during hunger strikes and even murder.
The California gold rush brought a substantial group of Asian immigrants to the American West. Under the "Whites-Only" clause of the 1790 Naturalization Law, these immigrants could not become American citizens.
In 1856, North Carolina became the last state in the Union to eliminate property qualification as a prerequisite for voting.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and the 13th Amendment of 1865, undermine slavery as a legal concept in the United States of America. Federal law, however, still allowed individual states to determine who was eligible to vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, establishing citizenship status for all persons born in the United States or naturalized. The Amendment also guaranteed equal protection under the law, due process of law, and privileges and immunities of citizens.
U.S. Senator Samuel Pomeroy introduced a resolution to amend the U. S. Constitution on December 7, 1868. The resolution read, “The basis of suffrage in the United States shall be that of citizenship, and all native or naturalized citizens shall enjoy the same rights and privileges of the elective franchise,” Two days later, Pomeroy rose again, “I present the petition of 55 citizens of Maine,” he proclaimed, “praying that…the right of suffrage may be extended to males and females equally.” Three days later, the Senate agreed to let Pomeroy’s bill “lie upon the table,” and there it remained, never to be taken up again.
The 1790 U. S. Naturalization Law was amended in 1870, it limited citizenship to "White persons and persons of African descent." This language meant that Asian and Latino immigrants still could not become naturalized citizens. However, the wave of Asian immigration to California and other Western states in the mid-19th century brought an increasing number of Asian and Latino children who are born in the United States and thus are considered American citizens.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, this amendment forbad discrimination in voting on the count of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
· Violence and economic reprisal are used to prevent Black men from voting throughout the Southern states
· Opposition to African American voting also takes place in Northern and Midwestern states
· With ratification of the 15th Amendment, the Constitution explicitly excluded women of all races from the right to vote
· The 15th Amendment does not apply to Native-Americans or Asians because most are not considered citizens
· The 15th Amendment does not apply to Mexican-Americans in New Mexico and Arizona because they live in territories that are not yet states
· Mexican-Americans in Texas and California continue to be discouraged from voting through violence and economic retaliation
Federal Reconstruction legislation permits thousands of African-Americans access to the vote, and over 2,000 are elected to office. The period also sees fourteen Black men serve in Congress, two in the United States Senate, and one African American became the Governor of Louisiana. Throughout the former Confederacy, over 600 ex-enslaved persons serve in Southern state legislatures, and hundreds are elected to county commissions, city councils, as well as other elected offices.
Widespread fraud plunges the 1876 presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes the Republican, and Samuel J. Tilden the Democrat, into chaos and conflict. A special Republican controlled committee, appointed by Congress, resolves the dispute by naming Hayes as the new President, even though many observers believe that Tilden had won the popular vote. As part of the "Compromise of 1877," the Hayes administration agreed not to enforce the 15th Amendment and other civil rights laws throughout the South. Thus, Republicans retained power in Washington D.C., while Democrats regained control over Southern legislatures, allowing them to roll back newly won political, social and economic freedoms for African-Americans.
At the 1890 Mississippi State Convention delegates agreed on a new constitution that required a literacy test and poll tax for eligible voters.
Mississippi pioneers a disenfranchisement Constitution, thereby leading the way for other Southern states to implement laws intended to negate the 15th Amendment. Among these laws are:
· Literacy Tests: Supposedly, tests were given to prove an applicant’s ability to read and understand English, with the idea of ensuring an educated and informed electorate. In practice the tests were used throughout the South to prevent African Americans from voting, and employed throughout the nation to disqualify less educated immigrants and the poor.
· Poll Taxes: Many states impose taxes as a prerequisite for voting. Since the taxes were relatively high and had to be paid in cash, the tax proved challenging to most working people, especially throughout the Southern states where African American incomes were artificially depressed.
· Residency Requirements: a potential voter had to live within a political jurisdiction for a predetermined amount of time, sometimes a year, in order to qualify to vote in an upcoming election.
· Grandfather-Clauses: a citizen, even if they could not pass a literacy test or pay a poll tax, could qualify for the vote if they had a grandfather who was eligible to vote — a requirement that descendants of slaves could not meet.
Within a few years after Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Presidency, most African-Americans in the former Confederate states are denied the right to vote and all were driven from elected office. Those who try to vote anyway, are fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, beaten, and in hundreds of cases they are lynched.
In 1878, during the 45th Congress, a woman’s suffrage amendment was introduced.
A number of Western states extend voting rights to women. Wyoming is the first western state to extend voting rights to women, then Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, California, and then other states follow suit over time.
In the United States v. Wong Kim, the Supreme Court confirmed that children of Asians who are born in the United States are citizens. Nevertheless, some Asians attempting to vote face violence, lynching, and economic retaliation.
In the 1898 Williams V. Mississippi ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the disenfranchising features of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, including a poll tax, disenfranchisement clauses, grandfather clause and literacy tests. The Court refused to interfere with Mississippi’s application of its laws because “the constitution of Mississippi and its statutes do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them.”
Delegates to the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention created a document with the expressed purpose of removing African-Americans from the political process. The Constitution included several features intended to reduce the number of African American voters, including the implementation of a literacy test, imposing employment and property qualifications, and disqualifying individuals convicted of a variety of minor crimes. State Constitutional Convention delegate John B. Knox, expressed the mindset of White legislators in Alabama when he stated that; “The convention’s goal is to establish White supremacy in the State, within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution.” As a result of these disenfranchisement tactics, the number of Black voters in Alabama plummeted from 180,000 in 1900, to 3,000 in 1903.
After decades of political action and public pressure, the 17th Amendment ended the appointment of U. S. Senators by state legislatures. The new Amendment required the direct election of U. S. Senators by popular vote.
Congress passes legislation extending U. S. citizenship to all Indians born in the U. S. Yet, Native-Americans in many states faced the same kinds of legal fictions, violence, and economic retaliation used to deny the vote to Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
In 1942, as World War II created manpower needs for the United States military, Filipinos in the United States and those on the Philippine Islands, were declared to be American citizens, making them eligible for military service and the draft.
In 1943, the United States overturns the Chinese Exclusion Acts in an effort to strengthen the wartime alliance with China.
In 1946, the United States repeals the exclusion acts against immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.
In 1946, this citizenship declaration is revoked by the Recision Act in order to deny Filipinos their veteran benefits, voting rights, and of course citizenship.)
In 1952 all remaining Asian exclusion acts are replaced by the immigration "quota system" that allows for some Asian immigration but greatly favors European immigrants.
In the 1944 Smith v. Allwright case, the United States Supreme Court ended the Democratic Party’s practice of allowing only White citizens to participate in Democratic primary elections. In this ruling, the high court found that political party performed a public function and could not claim they were a private organizations in order to exclude African American citizens.
Reverend Adam Clayton Powell was elected to Congress in 1945, where he served eleven consecutive terms, becoming chairman of the powerful Education and Labor Committee in 1961.
From Reconstruction to the 1960s, the "Solid South" described a situation where only Democrats could be elected to public office, as Southern Whites refuse to vote for Republican candidates. Southern Whites’ linked the Republican Party to President Abraham Lincoln and the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, and they connect the party to emancipation and African American voting and office holding. White southerners proudly declare themselves "Yellow-dog Democrats," meaning that if the Democratic Party nominates a yellow dog for office, they will vote for the dog before voting for a Republican.
In practice, the "Solid South" meant that most White Southerners were Democrats, and while many African Americans were denied the vote, the winner of the Democratic primary would inevitably win the general election. This effectively disenfranchises the few Blacks who have managed to register to vote because they are prevented from voting in the Democratic Primary, the only elections that would have been competitive.
In one of the post-war period's few successful legal challenges, the Federal courts overturn the last state laws (Maine, Arizona, New Mexico) that explicitly prevented Indians from voting. Violence, economic retaliation, and different kinds of legal tricks continue to be used to prevent Native-Americans from voting.
When Black, Latino, and Indian GIs return from the battlefields of WWII (and later Korea), they demand that all American citizens have the right to vote regardless of race. They had fought and died for democracy abroad, yet they cannot vote at home. (One out of every eight American GIs was an African-American; Latinos and Native-Americans also made up significant portions of the armed forces, which for the most part were organized on a segregated basis.)
On local, state, and federal levels GIs fight against the laws, customs, and oppression denying them the vote and other civil rights. Before WWII the NAACP numbered around 50,000 members, in the post-war years it swells ten times to over 500,000.
But the racists who hold economic power and political office — particularly in the U.S. Senate — are too strong. Most legislative remedies are blocked and few court cases are successful. For the most part, the GI movements are defeated and suppressed. Many GIs who had fought to free Europe from Nazi tyranny find themselves imprisoned for demanding the right to vote, and others are viciously murdered — often by police and sheriffs.
Yet despite a wave of repression, they do manage to eliminate the poll tax in all but 5 states. And in 1948 the armed forces are de-segregated.
On September 9, 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower signed this voting rights legislation into law. The legislation was Civil rights activists lobbied the federal government to address obstacles to African American voter registration. While the resulting Act was the first civil rights legislation passed by Congress since Reconstruction, it was relatively ineffectual, as it established the Civil Rights Commission to gather information on African American voting statistics, ?????? and ??????.
Voting rights and segregation became central issues in the direct-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Organizations such as Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), carried out sit-ins, freedom rides, marches, and boycotts, as they took the fight for voting rights and de-segregation into racially hostile Southern states. Using the slogan "One Man, One Vote," these groups organize people to directly challenge and defy the entire "Whites-only" system. They called for an end to racial discrimination and racial segregation. At the same time, they aggressively advocated for the right to vote, mobilizing communities around voting rights campaigns, organizing voting rights protests, lobbying legislators to pass voting rights legislation, and generally promoting voting as core feature of citizenship in the United States.
After President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the 1957 Civil Rights Act into law, Southern states continued to allow discriminatory voter registration practices. The 1960 Act was passed with the intent of closing loopholes that made the 1957 Civil Rights Act ineffectual.
The Supreme Court ruled that the “Equal Protection Clause” in the United States Constitution required state legislatures to conform to a “One Man One Vote” principle. This meant that states had to make an "honest and good faith" effort to draw districts that were close to equal population. In this Alabama case, the Court noted that the right to direct representation was "a bedrock of our political system," and that both houses of a bicameral state legislatures had to be apportioned on a population basis.
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment prohibits both Congress and the states from requiring a tax as a prerequisite to vote. After Reconstruction, eleven southern states used the poll tax to make it difficult for African Americans to vote. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964. At the time of the amendment’s passage, five states including Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, still used a poll tax as a requirement for voting.
During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, close to a thousand civil rights workers of all races and backgrounds from across the country converged on Mississippi to support voting rights and confront segregation. This is followed in August by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the whites-only Mississippi delegation at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. The self-evident justice of that challenge is ignored by Johnson and Humphrey and the challenge is denied
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination of all kinds, based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The law also empowered the federal government to enforce racial desegregation.
A few months later mass protests and marches begin in Selma Alabama. Thousands of African-Americans put their lives on the line by attempting to register to vote in Selma and surrounding counties. They are met with savage violence from police and Klan. They face beatings, gassing, jailings, and murder. Mass marches in Selma, Montgomery, Demopolis, Marion, Camden and elsewhere are viciously attacked. Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, Viola Luizzo, and Jonathan Daniels are murdered. But the people refuse to back down and the movement grows as thousands of Americans from all walks of life come to Selma in support. 25,000 people — of all races — march to the Statehouse in Montgomery Alabama, the "cradle of the Confederacy."
On August 6, President B. Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. This legislation made it illegal for states to employ discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread for disenfranchisement of Southern Blacks. The law made it illegal to require literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tactics used to restrict Black voting.
It takes 57 days of floor-fighting and mass protests in the streets of Washington to break the filibuster by Southern Senators determined to block the Voting Rights Act. For just the second time in history, a southern filibuster on a civil-rights issue is defeated on a bitterly divided vote. The Act is passed.
Though in some respects weaker than what had been hoped for, among other provisions the Voting Rights Act:
- Outlaws voting phony "requirements" — such as "literacy tests," — designed to deny the vote to people based on their race or color. This applies not only to Blacks but also to Indians, Asians, and Mexican-Americans.
- Authorizes the Federal government to take over registration of voters in areas where local officials have consistently denied voting rights to non-whites.
· Establishes that fluency in English cannot be made a requirement for voting eligibility.
By the end of the 1965, some 250,000 new Black voters have been registered to vote in the South. By the end of 1966, only 4 out of the 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African-Americans registered to vote. In the following years, Black registration in Alabama grows more than ten-fold, from 50,000 in 1960 to more than 500,000 in 1990. And by 1990, the number of southern Black legislators has risen from 2 to 160.
Growing voter rolls occurred against a backdrop of terror and economic retaliation. against Blacks in the South and Latinos and Native-Americans in the Southwest that continued for years after passage of the Voting Rights Act. to be used for a few more years against citizens-of-color who try to register to vote, particularly. The Civil Rights Movement continues the fight, with the "Meredith Mississippi March Against Fear," and mass direct-action campaigns in towns such as Grenada and Natchez Mississippi.
The Amendment was ratified against the backdrop of large and widespread protests against the Vietnam war, particularly protests by military aged citizens who could be drafted to fight in a war, while considered too young to vote in the nation’s elections. The Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to equal the draft age of 18 years old .
The Voting Rights Act is expanded to address voting rights of "language minorities." Based on the determination that voting discrimination against language minorities "is pervasive and national in scope," provisions are added to ensure that citizens who speak languages other than English are not denied their voting rights. For example, non-English voting materials and assistance now have to be provided where needed.
The United States Supreme Court struck down a one-year residency requirement to vote in Dunn v. Blumstein. The Court allowed limiting voter registration up to 30 to 50 days prior to an election, but ruled that residency requirements in excess of that violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Barbara Jordan, a Democrat from Texas, becomes the first African American woman from a Southern state to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Barack Obama is elected President of the United States.
Prior to the election of 2000, Jeb Bush the Republican Governor of Florida — and brother of Presidential candidate George Bush — hires a private company long associated with the Republican party to "purge" the Florida voting rolls of "ineligible" voters. Along with voters who really are ineligible, tens of thousands of legally registered Black voters are illegally stripped from the rolls. When they arrive at the polls on election day, they are told they cannot vote.
This denial of voting rights to African-American voters in Florida is the direct cause of George Bush's supposed 537 vote "victory" in that state. It is this phony "win" (plus the votes of the 5 Republican appointees on the Supreme Court) that makes him President, even though Gore receives 500,000 more votes nation-wide than Bush.
According to the report issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil rights:
- Widespread voter disenfranchisement — not the dead-heat contest — was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election.
- Violations of the Voting Rights Act occurred in Florida and there was widespread denial of voting rights.
- Black voters were nearly 10 times more likely than non-Black voters to have their ballots rejected.
- The state's highest officials responsible for ensuring fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility.
Had tens of thousands of Black voters not been illegally denied their right to vote, Democratic candidate Al Gore would certainly have carried the state by a comfortable margin — and he would have been President.
Beginning with the bitterly-contested Presidential election of 2000, political parties are increasingly devoting energy and money towards "suppressing" the turnout of demographic groups who traditionally favor the other side. The Republican Party is particularly active in targeting naturalized immigrant citizens, Blacks, Latinos, and those seniors who traditionally vote Democratic. Suppression tactics include both legal ploys and outright deceit. Some examples include:
Voter ID laws. In a number of states, Republicans have passed laws requiring voters to show a photo-ID before they can cast their ballots. These laws discourage voting by the elderly and poor who are less likely to own a car and are thus less likely to posses a valid drivers license or other form of photo ID.
Targeted voter purges. In Georgia and other states, minority, immigrant, and college-student voters have been disproportionately "purged" from the rolls on various pretexts.
