Our Little Known Voting Rights History
I was taught in elementary school that we fought the British to become an independent, democratic country. We rejected monarchy and in its place had the people vote for their leaders. As with many things I was taught in social studies, it is sort of true, but not really. The founding fathers rejected monarchy for a system that was essentially a plutocracy, a government run by the wealthy.
If it were 1789, the year of the first presidential election in the US, I would not be allowed to vote and most likely you wouldn’t either. The states controlled the election process and white men with property were the only Americans routinely permitted to vote. Researchers estimate that those rules resulted in about 6 percent of the voting age population being allowed to vote in the early years of our nation[1].
Exhibit 1 summarizes the major laws and Constitutional Amendments that have changed voting eligibility since our nation’s founding and their impact on voter turnout. As the exhibit shows, voting rights in the US is closely linked to our history with slavery and racial discrimination. Slowly, over our nearly 250 year history, we have expanded voter eligibility to include nearly all adults. The impact estimates in Exhibit 1 show the percentage change in adults who voted in the next presidential election following the voting rights change. For some of these changes, the full effect on voting behaviors occurred over multiple election cycles. For example, voter turnout fell between 1960 and 1968 despite the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964 and passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, voter turnout has generally been increasing since 1968 and in 2020 the turnout rate was 64.3 percent, which is the highest rate the US has achieved.
Exhibit 1. Voting Rights: Major Dates in History
Presently, the voting age population (VAP) is 258,310,278 in the US. When we remove those who are ineligible to vote due to incarceration, being a felon, or not a citizen, the voting eligible population (VEP) is 239,470,150, which is 92.7 percent of the VAP.
Both measures are commonly used as denominators when measuring voter turnout. For the purposes of examining how inclusive our voting laws have been over time, the VAP is the more meaningful measure. The turnout rate based on the VAP captures the effect of both laws that overtly exclude segments of the population from voting (make them ineligible) as well as those that make it more difficult for certain groups to vote. Furthermore, to facilitate comparisons over time, I used a constant definition of the VAP (all adults 19 or older [2] ) to calculate the turnout rates. Exhibit 2 shows the estimated turnout rate for all presidential elections for which there is available data.
Exhibit 2. Estimated Voter Turnout Rates Over Time [3]
For the majority of our history, our voting system was not very democratic. Exhibit 2 shows that prior to 1928, less than 40 percent of the adult population voted. We did not hit 50-percent voting participation until 1940 and it took another 80 years to achieve 60-percent participation.
We are at Risk for Loosing all the Progress Made
The long-term trend of expanding voting rights to more people appears to have come to an end and most new voting laws have been designed to restrict who can vote or make it more difficult to vote. Many of these initiatives are presented as safeguards against fraud. But there is no rationale for limiting early voting, polling place hours, or the number of polling places other than to make it more difficult for people to vote. These types of changes disproportionally affect those who are lower income and have little flexibility in their jobs to go and vote. In addition, there is a major Supreme Court case that will be decided this year, Moore v. Harper, that could dramatically undermine the power of the people in the voting process. North Carolina legislators have asked the court to grant them unchecked power to set rules for voting and elections, without state constitutional limits. If the court rules in their favor, they could, for example, select electors for the Electoral College that vote in opposition to how the people voted. This was one of the ways Donald Trump sought to turn over the election results. It would making voting in presidential elections irrelevant.
The fundamental voting rights question for the American people is whether you want to live in a democracy or a plutocracy. We have only become a true democracy in the past few years and we are now at high risk of sliding backwards 200 years.
Notes
[1] “Expansion of Rights and Liberties – The Right of Suffrage”. Online Exhibit: The Charters of Freedom. National Archives. https://web.archive.org/web/20160706144856/http:/www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_of_freedom_13.html
[2] In reporting the population by age groups, Census using 19 and older as a cut point. Therefore my measures underestimate the VAP and, overestimates turnout, as it excludes that are 18 years old from the denominator. However, the main focus of these measures is to examine change over time rather than provide highly accurate point estimate.
[3] See footnote 1 for the source of the 1789 estimate. From 1828 onward, turnout is estimated using votes cast for the major candidates from Vital Statistics on American Politics as the numerator. The denominator is decennial Census population counts multiplied by the current share of the population that is 19 or older (73.3%) with straight line interpellation for non-Census years.