Voting is central to the equality of all Americans, so in honor of our constitutional right to vote, following is a brief history of voting rights in the United States.
1776: Although the Declaration of Independence has just been signed and the United States’ independent status has not yet been recognized by many countries, the right to vote begins in America as a legal privilege almost exclusively available to white, property-owning, Protestant men.
1788: With the ratification of the Constitution, all slaves are counted as 3/5’s of a single person on the national census.
1790: The Naturalization Act bars all persons of Asian descent from becoming naturalized. Only “free white” immigrants are recognized as eligible for naturalization.
1792: New Hampshire becomes the first state to eliminate its property requirements, thereby extending the right to vote to almost all white men.
1807: Women lose the right to vote in every state in the US for the next 113 years.
1828: Maryland becomes the last state to remove religious restrictions when it passes legislation enfranchising Jews. White men can no longer be denied the right to vote on the basis of their religion.
1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo renders the lands now known as Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada US territory. All Mexican persons within these territories are declared US citizens, but simultaneously denied the right to vote by English proficiency, literacy, and property requirements along with violence, intimidation, and racist nativism.
1856: North Carolina becomes the last state to eliminate its pr operty requirements. The right to vote is extended to all white men in America.
1857: In the landmark case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the US Supreme Court rules that “a black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.” African Americans are further deprived of the right to citizenship and, by extension, the right to vote.
1866: The first Civil Rights Act grants citizenship, but not the right to vote, to all persons born in the USA.
1869-70: The Fifteenth Amendment is passed in Congress and ratified by the states. The right to vote is now legally guaranteed to all male citizens regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
1882: Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which establishes restrictions and quotas on Chinese immigration while legally excluding Chinese persons from citizenship and voting.
1889-1890: Poll taxes and literacy tests specifically designed to reduce African American voting power are introduced in Southern states for the first time.
1890: The Indian Naturalization Act allows Native Americans to acquire citizenship.
1896: Louisiana is the first state to implement a grandfather clause in its election policy. No male citizen whose grandparent was deprived of the right to vote may exercise that right himself.
1915: The US Supreme Court finds Oklahoma’s grandfather clause unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States.
1919-20: The Nineteenth Amendment is adopted by Congress and ratified by the states into law. The right to vote is now guaranteed to all citizens regardless of gender.
1922: The US Supreme Court rules that persons of Japanese origin are insufficiently white to qualify for citizenship in Takao Ozawa v. United States.
1923: The US Supreme Court declares persons of Indian descent, even “high caste Hindus”, as ineligible for citizenship because they cannot be legally recognized as “white” persons.
1924: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declares all non-citizen Native Americans born in the USA to be citizens with the right to vote.
1937: Georgia’s poll taxes are found constitutional by the US Supreme Court in Breedlove v. Suttles.
1943: The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed, and Chinese persons are now eligible for naturalization.
1946: Filipinos receive the right to naturalization after almost 50 years of colonialism.
1946: Federal courts find white primary systems in Georgia unconstitutional in King v. Chapman.
