Voter Disenfranchisement

VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT IS the denial of the vote to a class of persons because they fail to meet a particular qualification. There have been several prevalent reasons given by election board authorities disqualifying voters throughout U.S. history. At the founding of the United States, only adult males were allowed to vote, with the exception of New Jersey, which had no requirement that voters be male.

Three of the original 13 states disenfranchised non-white voters. During this early period, states established property, taxpaying, and residency requirements as qualifications for voting. The typical property qualification required persons to own a certain amount of land in order to be eligible to vote, while taxpaying qualifications required persons to have paid taxes the year prior to the election. The rationale for the taxpaying and property qualifications was that those without money or property lacked the necessary independence to exercise the vote without influence from the more affluent. The residency requirements, which varied from a requirement of six months in the county to two years in the state, were established to ensure that voters had a stake in the community in which they were voting. According to one estimate, as a result of these voting qualifications, only 60 to 70 percent of adult white men could vote in 1790.

States joining the union in the late 18th and early 19th centuries usually instituted taxpaying qualifications rather than property qualifications for voting. The theory was that people who paid taxes, regardless of whether they owned property, should have their voices represented and their interests defended in the government that they participated in funding. Property qualifications also became less popular as a result of increasing urbanization from industrialization, which greatly reduced the property-owning class of voters. By the middle of the 18th century, most state property qualifications had been eliminated. States also gradually eliminated taxpaying qualifications. A reason cited by one commentator for the elimination of the taxpaying requirements was the difficulty of enforcement and problems of fraud. More substantive, there was a gradual shift in ideology away from the idea that non-taxpayers and non-property-owners lacked the necessary independence to exercise the vote. Instead, the concept of universal white male suffrage gained favor, stimulated by the competition among political parties for new classes of voters. Despite the extension of the vote to an increasing number of white male voters, paupers (for example, persons receiving state economic aid), were the one remaining class of voters disenfranchised because of their economic status. The old theory concerning the independence of the voter and the view that paupers could be manipulated and influenced to vote by those with money continued to have adherents.

While the vote was extended to more white males, states in the years preceding the Civil War increasingly enacted voting qualifications that disenfranchised non-white male voters. As a result of racism and the popular belief that African Americans lacked the necessary personal qualities to vote, the number of states that disenfranchised non-white voters increased from three of 13 in 1790 to 25 of 31 in 1855.

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