Let’s begin with a very short quiz. True or false: Up to 1926 non-citizens in many States could vote in local, state, and national elections.
If you answered True, you are ………correct.
If you carefully read the original ratified constitution, you will note that it did not explicitly define who could vote. Or, for that matter even define citizen or citizenship. In fact, and practice, voting rights in the several states at our founding tended to be based on the big three: acquired wealth, gender, and race. These three qualifications defined who could and, consequently, who could not vote. While property qualifications pretty much disappeared in the early 19th century, gender and race defined who could vote, not citizenship, for many, many decades.
Some state constitutions merely asserted “white males” could vote with no mention of citizenship. As the country expanded westward voting by aliens was encouraged, for instance in the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 “freehold aliens” could vote. Some states required aliens to take an oath that they were upstanding inhabitants and intended to become citizens. Becoming a naturalized citizenship was linked to race, however, in our early Republic.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated that only “free white person of good character’ could become citizens after two years of residence, however, several following Acts raised the residency requirements first to five years, and then in 1798 the Alien and Sedition Act raised the residency requirement to 14 years. This last requirement did not last long and was in response to fears of dastardly French influences.
The Constitution of 1789, while never linking voting to citizenship, clearly stated, however, that the President, Representatives, and Senators must be citizens, and added an additional modifier for President, they must be a ‘natural born citizen.’ The absence of any express statement in the constitution linking citizenship to voting suggests that voting by non-citizens was such common practice that it was deemed a common law right, at least in the American colonies which, before the revolution, were generally governed by written charters.
Americans, it seems, before they were technically American, were better off than their fellow Englishmen in Great Britian in terms of suffrage. In Great Britian, voting in the 18th century was extremely restricted and it was not until a series of reforms in the 19th century did Great Britian enlarge the voting franchise.
For about 150 years then, many states permitted aliens, that is non-citizens, to vote. I think Scalia, were he alive, and other constitutional originalists would vomit at that thought.
Voting by non-citizens did ebb and flow over time, however. Wars resulted in contractions of voting rights by non-citizens, for instance the War of 1812 and the First World War saw pushback. The rise of nativist movements as waves of immigrants arrived provoked some pushback as well on non-citizen voting rights in the mid 19th century. This accelerated when immigrants from eastern or southern Europe — such as Greece or Italy — began arriving in huge numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[i]
Basically, folks from an earlier list of shithole countries or representing threatening religions, you know, the ever-dangerous Catholic or Jew. Claims of intellectual, genetic, and moral inferiority abounded. They couldn’t assimilate many claimed. Does that not sound familiar?
As we have seen, voting rights in America has a peculiar history and was (and is it seems) very much tied with gender and race, not citizenship. Citizenship was a variable state by state. Women gained the right to vote 105 years ago. African American men in 1870. Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until 1952, and therefore ineligible to vote.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did much to enforce and federalize and nationalize the right to vote. It did much to ensure all citizens, regardless of race or origin, were given equal opportunity to vote. That is no longer the case. While the reversals of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been articulated in terms of impacts on black and brown voters, the demise of the Act will have broader impacts on other communities: Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, and other diaspora communities.
Trump’s new immigration policy is designed to impact the make-up of the next generation of voters. Afrikaners over Africans, whites over others. And, with the help of the Robert’s court, making it harder for everyday Americans of color to vote in states with long histories of denying black and brown people the right to vote. The attack on the Voting Rights Act is just one part of a broader, systemic attack on who is an American, who can become an American, and therefore, who has a voice in America’s present and future.
This November we are voting for more than just neutering Trump politically, we are fighting for whose America this is, and who will inherit America from us once we are gone. This is a generational vote, a vote for our kids, our grandkids, and our generations of unborn Americans.
Post Script: The Supreme Court recently invalidated Louisiana’s congressional district voting map because districts were gerrymandered by race. A normal grace period of a month was set aside by the Court to allow immediate action by Louisiana. Voting was already underway. The Louisiana governor is currently refusing to count over 30k mail-in votes already received.
[i] Texas permitted non-citizens to vote until 1921. Indiana as well. Kansas 1918. Oregon 1914. Virginia 1818. Pennsylvania 1838. See Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States, 2006.
