Is Voting A Right or A Privilege In the US?

express.co.uk

Privilege is a benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantaged of most. A right is what is due to anyone by just claim, legal guarantees or moral principles. So, what is voting in the US – a privilege or right?

A study conducted by 2006 by Peter D Hart Research Associates found that a greater proportion of participants saw voting as a privilege because previous generations has fought for it and other countries don’t enjoy the same freedom. For them it was not a right – an entitlement- they had to fight for it.

Characterising voting as a right or privilege can say a lot about a democracy. Nations like Australia have mandator voting base and consider voting a responsibility. The Human Rights Act 1998 also establishes right to vote as a human right. The UK tried to disenfranchise incarcerated British citizens, but an ECHR court found UK in breach human rights for denying 80,000 incarcerated British Citizens the ‘right’ to vote. On the contrary if we examine examine cases of permanent disenfranchisement of citizens with felony convictions, superfluous voter identification requirements and complex voter registration laws US’ State legislatures often act on the sense of voting being more of a privilege.

Voting in the US can be challenging and difficult. The US has inconsistent systems that are under-resourced and given scant attention until election years. Voter registration lists are clunky and often wrong. Some jurisdictions require a photo ID. Election Day is a Tuesday. And ballots aren’t always straightforward. These systemic issues deter people from voting. The US election system is often used by the parties to supress voters to get a favourable outcome. Even at the time of it’s founding, voting was not a right, but a privilege only enjoyed by a few. At that time, voting was restricted to wealthy white landowners. The founding fathers debated extending voting rights to the commoners who fought in the American Revolution but ultimately decided (as seen in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution) that the time, manner and places of holding Senate and Representative elections will be prescribed by the state legislatures and the Congress may alter such regulations. By doing so the Framers of the Constitutions effectively decoupled voting rights from citizenship. Declaration of Independence asserts that a government is legitimate only if it enjoys the “consent of the governed.” But for much of U. history, it hasn’t worked that way. Instead, the people have had to seek consent from the political party in power to participate.

In the years following its founding, voter requirement varied wildly according to the whims and prejudices of each state (and they still do). Most states expanded the eligibility at first but ultimately only provided near-universal suffrage for white men. only five of 16 states had instituted white-only voting, yet from 1802 onward, every new free or slave state to join the Union except for Maine banned Black people from voting. In 1807, New Jersey, which originally gave voting rights to “all inhabitants,” passed a law to disenfranchise women and Black men. Maryland banned Jewish people from its polls until 1828. Voting seemed to be privilege belonging to a particular race, gender and religion.

As time went by, certain limits were dropped on which men could vote. By 1828, all states had removed religious restrictions. By 1856, all white men could choose their representatives, regardless of property. Meanwhile, the abolitionist movement pushed Northern states to grant freed Black men voting rights, albeit with property restrictions. In that time period, another key component of voter suppression arose legally defining how one votes. After the Mexican American War, Mexican men living in now-American territories were given citizenship, and thus the right to vote. But they were largely stifled at the polls by forced English proficiency tests and acts of intimidation.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, Congress passed a series of constitutional amendments to guarantee the rights of formerly enslaved people, including the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which prohibited denying the vote based on “race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.” In this reconstruction era, the political life opened up in the South. Though women were still unable to vote, as were many immigrants and Native Americans, Black men gained power in some parts of the South. Mississippi even sent two Black men to the U.S. Senate as representatives of the Republican Party, of which Black men formed an overwhelming majority in the South.

But the states were still in charge of the elections and some of them set out to find new ways to reserve the voting privileges to the class they deemed fit. White Democrats were not happy with losing control to the Republicans in the construction era. In 1875, Mississippi Democrats launched a campaign of intimidation at the polls that succeeded in restoring white Democrats to power in Mississippi by 1881. Hoping to stay in power, they convened a state constitutional convention in 1890. Democrats later “widely admitted” the convention was designed to circumvent the 15th Amendment. Leveraging the state’s power to determine how and when elections would be held, the new state constitution instituted tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests designed specifically to shut out Black voters to whom they denied the education and economic opportunities needed to clear these hurdles.

Soon, other Southern states followed Mississippi’s lead and enacted their own restrictive laws, known as Jim Crow laws, which they paired with continued violence and intimidation to suppress the Black vote. By 1892, Mississippi had cut the percentage of eligible Black men who were registered to vote from more than 90 percent to less than 6 percent. Black citizens were equally disenfranchised across the South and the conservative Southern Democratic Party surged to power. For the next 70 years, white supremacists continued to use these voter suppression tactics to ensure their rule. Literacy tests were administered at the discretion of those in charge of voter registration and often discriminated against African Americans. Literary tests asked civics questions such as "In which document or writing is the Bill of Rights found?" or "Name two of the purposes of the U.S. Constitution" as found in a Alabama literacy test. African Americans who took part in these tests were descendants of slaves who were not allowed to read or write in several states due to anti-literacy laws. White men who could not pass the literacy tests were able to vote due to the "Grandfather Clause" allowing them to participate in voting if their grandfathers voted by 1867.

Some precincts even held "whites only" primaries in direct opposition to federal law. Attempts to break or protest Jim Crow laws often met with deadly retribution. The intimidation and suppression campaign was so successful that only 3 percent of voting-age African American southerners were registered to vote in 1940. Even the future chief justice William Rehnquist was accused of intimidating voters in Arizona’s Maricopa County as part of Eagle Eye during the 1962 election, where “every black or Mexican person” was challenged to read the Constitution in English and then to interpret it.

In 1920, suffrage was extended to women after a long fight by the suffragettes. However, in reality this only applied to white women. Black women and other women of colour were still subject to the Jim Crow laws. Indigenous residents who served in the First World War were first given citizenship, and then the right was extended universally in 1924. After the Second World War, Asian-Americans were allowed to apply for citizenship and hence voting rights.

The civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s laid bare the fact that people of colour in the US. Black registration drives and massive non-violent protests led to the passage of the 24th Amendment, which banned poll taxes, and the Voting Rights Act, which codified illegal devices like literacy tests and finally established federal oversight. Jurisdictions notorious for voter discrimination would have to get any changes cleared by Washington. Subsequent legislation lent protections to Indigenous Americans as well. Poll taxes weren't banned until 1966, when the Supreme Court found Virginia's poll taxes to be unconstitutional.

In the decades after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the U.S. government took further action to ensure citizens’ right to vote, from protecting the rights of voters who don’t speak English to making polling places more accessible to the elderly and people with disabilities.

At this point, the tables had turned. It was more beneficial for Democrats to have a diverse range of voters. Now Republicans were organising poll watchers to intimidate voters. Republican-led state legislatures nationwide introduced a variety of new restrictions, which make it more difficult to cast a vote. Some require voters to first obtain identification or proof of citizenship; others purge inactive names from the rolls of registered voters; and still others have shortened early voting periods or limited access to absentee and mail-in voting. The GOP sponsored the creation of a group called the National Ballot Security Task Force to patrol polling stations in search of voter fraud. The task force, staffed by off-duty police officers armed with loaded service revolvers and wearing blue armbands, was sued for steering black voters away from polling stations in New Jersey and forced to disband.

The progress made in the civil rights era did not mark a shift from voting being a privilege to right in the US. In its 2000 ruling, Alexander v Mineta, the US Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s interpretation that the Constitution ‘does not protect the right of all citizens to vote, but rather the right of all qualified citizens to vote.’ And it is state legislatures that wield the power to decide who is ‘qualified.’

Voter suppression now has a different form in modern era. In 2006, as Republican poll numbers were slipping, funded by a $1.5 million federal grant disbursed by then-governor Rick Perry, went after dozens of alleged mail-ballot fraudsters, primarily Democrats and people of colour.

Puerto Rico and DC don’t even have representation in the Senate. Other states have tightened the window for absentee, overseas and early voting, and banned same-day voter registration. Some states want to require voters to provide a proof of citizenship.

Disinformation is a hugely popular tactic now. In the 2008 elections, Democrats in Nevada received robo-calls informing them that they could vote on November 5 — a day after the election — to avoid long lines. Hispanic voters in Nevada received similar messages saying that they could vote by phone.

Money and lobbying has had a significant impact on who gets to vote. Weyrich, the founder of Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was of the opinion that not everyone should vote. ALEC has been instrumental in helping state legislatures put up new impediments to voting, including Texas’s 2011 voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation. 

The Supreme Court has also failed to guarantee voting as a right. •   In 2008, the Supreme Court approved an Indiana voter ID law, even conceding that it had a partisan basis, because it was not "excessively burdensome" to most voters. (Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, concurred separately to suggest that the proper level of scrutiny was more like "whatever the legislature wants.")

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back a key provision of the Voting Rights Act provision that gave federal authorities oversight of districts based on their histories of voter discrimination, which had long prevented such regulations.

Some US states have also pushed for an aggressive campaign to punish minor violations of election law with severe sentences. The most infamous of these cases involves Crystal Mason, a Black mother of three from Fort Worth, who was on supervised release for a felony tax fraud charge when she cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election. Unbeknownst to her, that was illegal—she had to wait until the end of supervised release to vote. Her ballot was rejected and never counted. Yet she was nonetheless convicted of voting illegally and sentenced to five years in jail.

Gerrymandering is also considered to be another form of voter suppression. It is the process by which one divides or arranges (a territorial unit) into election districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage. It either dilutes their vote, or it makes it hyper-concentrated, so it dilutes in other places. This can disproportionately impact minority groups by either packing them together or scattering them in a way their vote wouldn’t make an impact.

The modern voter suppression tactics have continued despite the fact that in 2018, the bipartisan and independent U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a comprehensive report declaring that procedures like strict voter ID laws “wrongly prevent some citizens from voting” and “have a disparate impact on voters of colour and poor voters.” It found that states with strict voter ID laws correlate with an increased gap between white and minority voters; that proof-of-citizenship laws place an undue burden by requiring citizens to pay fees to obtain those documents; and that cutting early voting creates long lines that limit minority citizens’ access to the polls.

The story of voter suppression in the US doesn’t end here. Over six million Americans with criminal records – most of whom are Black and low-income – are blocked from voting in many states. A number of Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws barring convicted felons — even those who have served their time — from ever voting again. Enfranchisement of ex-felons often depend on if it will be beneficial for the ruling party.

Therefore, as we can see, voting remains a privilege in the US, particularly for people of colour. Americans still have to look to their political parties to grant them voting rights and political parties only grants it to those they think will vote for them.

by Swarnim Agrahari