The History of the Ballot and the People Who Cast Them

Voting is the cornerstone of our representative democracy. As each election comes around, Americans are exhorted to “vote and make your voice heard.” Casting a ballot, we are told, is our patriotic duty as citizens and the most direct way that we can influence our government. While many Americans question the efficacy of their ballots, few question their right to cast them. But the current American electorate is not the one envisioned by its founders, who would be bewildered by the numbers, classes, sexes, and races of Americans that vote each Election Day. They intended a world in which a limited number of propertied men like themselves rose above self-interest and voted on behalf of the rest of “the people.” Many of the people, however, showed a stubborn desire to vote directly in order to choose their leaders and laws.

Even during the Revolution, some patriots pressed to broaden the suffrage to include free men with little or no property. What followed were contentious struggles, reluctant adjustments, and continual negotiations as groups of aspiring voters tried to persuade their fellow citizens, lawmakers, and courts to let them share the power of the polls.

Voting rights have expanded, contracted, and expanded again as Americans dealt with shifting issues of politics, race, class, and wealth. Each addition to the electorate altered the balance of power and led to collisions between practical politics and America’s democratic ideal of government “by the people.” Over the years Americans in power have offered the vote as incentive or reward for supporting political parties, moving west, or bearing arms. When the need for these supporters, settlers, and soldiers diminished, periods of more liberal voting laws were often followed by a tightening of requirements and new restrictions. While some established voters believed that extending the vote to more Americans would strengthen the nation, others questioned the wisdom of including people who might not share their concerns or who could threaten their control of the country’s political, social, and economic structures. Issues of justice, worthiness, and equality have all been weighed as we decided whose voices would be heard in the voting booth.

Whether by constitutional amendment or by federal, state, or local legislation, expanding the electorate means changing laws. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans of different races, sexes, ancestries, religions, and levels of education and income demanded the right to participate fully in America’s political life. To gain the vote, they needed to convince their fellow citizens of the justice of their desire for the ballot and to allay fears of sharing power with people different from themselves. In the face of sometimes violent opposition, they rallied, lobbied, and marched their way to the voting booth. Along the way, they found allies and opponents in the government and in their communities. But the passage of a law or the ratification of a constitutional amendment does not guarantee a warm welcome for new voters. Americans wary of change often created new laws and regulations to keep newly enfranchised citizens from casting ballots and to prevent others from aspiring to. Americans have found that persistence and a determined blend of activism and legislation are needed to get and keep the vote.

Owning property of a certain size or value was the earliest qualification for voters in the new United States. The propertied men who set up state governments maintained that only people like themselves had a permanent interest in the welfare of the state and the independence to vote their own minds. They believed that the votes of wage earners, whose livelihood was dependent on the goodwill of others, could be easily coerced. Making property ownership the primary requirement for voting allowed women and free African Americans to vote in some states.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, “free suffrage” was the goal of men who believed that having an interest in the fortunes of their country was not conditional on owning property. They agitated to amend state constitutions and abolish property requirements for voting. Some in power shared their philosophy. Others found that the growing power of the “common man,” the shifting American economy, and the need for new voters to support their own new political parties were compelling reasons to support free suffrage. From the 1820s through the 1850s, states abolished property and tax requirements for casting ballots, and white workingmen gained a permanent influence on American elections. But as the political elite opened the franchise to include more white men, they tightened it to exclude others whose interests they found potentially more threatening. Many states began to define eligible voters as white males over the age of twenty-one. Nearly all white men could vote in the 1856 presidential election. Only six states, however—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont— allowed free African American men to vote, and no state extended voting rights to women.

While more men were gaining the right to vote, New Jersey women, the last to retain voting rights, lost their ballots in 1807, when the state restricted suffrage to free, white, male citizens. The organized movement for civil equality began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention, but it took decades of fighting for rights to their children, property, money, education, and employment by three generations of women before they convinced a majority of American men to support their right to vote.

The movement employed two strategies. A constitutional amendment to enfranchise women was introduced in 1878 but languished for decades in a Congress that felt no need for women’s votes. Suffragists also organized to change state laws and constitutions and gain the ballot state by state in “votes for women” campaigns. The West led the way, with Wyoming women becoming the first to vote in 1890. Colorado, Utah, and Idaho followed, but so did a series of defeats, and by the turn of the century the movement languished.

There was a resurgence in the new century, and the 1910s saw a steady increase of state suffrage campaigns. Between 1910 and 1919, twenty-four states and territories granted women full or partial voting rights. Meanwhile, a new generation of suffragists reinvigorated the crusade for a constitutional amendment as the surest and fastest way to guarantee the vote for all women. Supported by sympathetic congressmen and the first elected congresswoman, they waged a campaign of persistent lobbying and highly theatrical public demonstrations. This pressure, combined with women’s participation in the war effort, secured President Woodrow Wilson’s endorsement of the amendment in 1918, and the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women was ratified in 1920.

Participation in the suffrage movement made women highly visible agitators, claiming space in the public arena and demonstrating their skills as organizers and advocates. Opponents of the measure claimed that woman suffrage would lead to neglect of children, confusion of gender roles, and prohibition. Suffragists and supporters countered with images of strong but feminine voters with years of experience and contributions as mothers, homemakers, breadwinners, community activists, and leaders of national reform movements. By the early twentieth century, suffragists came from all classes and races, but educated white mothers, professionals, and philanthropists were the face of the movement, reassuring the white upper- and middle-class congressmen voting on the suffrage amendment that expanding the electorate to include women would not be as momentous a change as they might have feared.

Although women were finally welcomed to the electorate in 1920, African Americans, immigrants, and the poor often found themselves still shut out of polling places until well into the twentieth century. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment made African Americans citizens of the United States. But the final measure of equality and defense against racist reprisals was the vote. As African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” Former abolitionists who believed in equality for freedmen and practical politicians who saw their votes as a way to retain Republican control of the conquered Confederate states worked together to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, giving African American men the right to vote. African Americans celebrated the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment as another step toward equality, but the celebration was shortlived. Within ten years, former Confederates had regained control of southern state governments. The collapse of Reconstruction left blacks segregated socially and disqualified politically.

Newcomers to the United States also found obstacles on their path to the polling place. Americans are proud to be part of a nation of immigrants, but some were reluctant to share the ballot box with more recent arrivals. Concerned that immigrants might compete with them for political power, established voters sometimes questioned the loyalty, political philosophies, religions, and self-interest of each new group. They also worried, as they had about the unpropertied men of the early nineteenth century, that the ballots of immigrants would be susceptible to manipulation by powerful employers or political party machines. Immigrants found that while their labor was valued, their political concerns and opinions were often unwelcome. Tying voting to citizenship, combined with stringent voter eligibility requirements, lessened the gains and electoral impact of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant groups, while Americanization programs encouraged them to embrace “real American” values and to become naturalized citizens so that they too could vote. Restrictive naturalization rules prevented Asian immigrants from becoming citizens until the 1940s and, although they were not immigrants, all Native Americans were not considered citizens until 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.

Americans found that the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing all born or naturalized citizens equal protection under the law), Fifteenth Amendment (guaranteeing that the vote cannot be denied to citizens because of race or color), and Nineteenth Amendment (guaranteeing that the vote cannot be denied to citizens because of sex) did not secure their place in line at the polls. For African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, particularly in the South and West, voting rights were limited officially through literacy tests, poll taxes, “English only” voter registration forms, complicated voter registration rules, and “white only” primary elections, and unoffi cially through intimidation and violence. Voting rights demonstrations, especially in the South, were viewed as a threat to the entrenched power structure and strong culture of racial segregation. Nevertheless, community activists, often led by young people and World War II veterans whose service made them unwilling to accept second-class citizenship, organized to fight for civil and social rights.

In 1962, following its sit-ins at North Carolina lunch counters and freedom rides, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began conducting voter education and registration drives using the slogan “One Man, One Vote.” In 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) targeted Selma, Alabama, for its own voter registration drive. When a demonstration in a neighboring town erupted in violence (one participant, Jimmy Lee Jackson, was shot and killed by a state trooper), African American residents planned a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Millions of Americans were horrified by images of the peaceful marchers led by SCLC’s Reverend Hosea Williams and SNCC’s John Lewis being beaten by police while white onlookers cheered. From across the nation, volunteers came to join the march, while others sent letters and telegrams to Washington demanding reform. On August 6, 1965, four months after the public outcry over the brutality in Selma, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The act suspended restrictive state laws that created racial barriers to voting and sent federal examiners to the South to enroll voters and supervise registration and voting in areas with a history of abuse, whose voter laws now came under federal oversight.

Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans faced similar barriers, with the added complication that literacy tests, ballots, and registration instructions could be insurmountable obstacles for potential voters who were not fl uent in English. The Voting Rights Act stopped the use of literacy tests in the affected Southern states and for Puerto Rican residents of New York but not in the rest of the country. In 1970 Congress extended the Act for five years. Its amendments included a ban on literacy tests nationwide but did not enlarge the areas in which voter registration practices were monitored, and no new groups were brought under the act’s protection. Seeing the positive results that the Voting Rights Act was having for African Americans in the South, aggrieved groups lobbied for the same protections. In 1975 they testified before Congress, painting a picture of the discrimination they faced at the polls. By a large margin, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to extend protection to four “language minorities”— American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Spanish-heritage citizens. The extension required voting districts with significant populations of Native Americans, Native Alaskans, Asian Americans, and Latinos to provide translation assistance, ballots, and instructions in those specific groups’ languages.

“Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” was the rallying cry for lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Through all the changes in almost two centuries of voting laws, one requirement remained unchanged: American must be twenty-one years of age to cast their first ballots. The idea of changing the voting age was raised periodically, usually in times of war. During World War II, a proposal to amend the Constitution and lower the voting age to eighteen, to match the new age for the military draft, failed (the state of Georgia, however, did lower its voting age to eighteen). In spite of the support of teachers associations, veterans organizations, and President Dwight Eisenhower, only Alaska, Hawaii, and Kentucky joined Georgia in the postwar years. During the war in Vietnam, the issue gained momentum, led by young people themselves. Congressional supporters sought to change the voting age in an amendment to the Voting Rights Act in 1970. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act amendment applied only to federal elections, a constitutional amendment became the inevitable next step as states confronted the burden of administering two sets of rules for state and federal elections. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified in a hundred days—the fastest approval of any constitutional amendment. Effort now turned to capturing the loyalty and ballots of the new voters. Political parties and independent groups organized registration campaigns aimed at newly enfranchised “youths.”

As new and diverse groups of Americans won the right to vote and overcame the legal obstacles keeping them out of voting booths, local and national concerns shifted from whether they could vote to whether they would (or should) vote. Some states changed voter registration requirements and Election Day rules in attempts to minimize the impact of newly enfranchised groups. Other advocates and officials encouraged voters to come out to the polls and looked for ways to make voting easier and create a more inclusive voter pool.

Read more in American Democracy, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from American Democracy © 2017 by the Smithsonian Institution