From its start, the United States gave citizens the right to vote — as long as they were white men who owned property. From counting a slave as 3/5 of a white man to the creation of the Electoral College, there's a through-line of barriers that extends to today based on racial politics.
Why it matters: 150 years after the 15th Amendment — and 55 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — people of color still face systemic obstacles to voting.
The state of play: The Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing a slew of new state laws to make voting more difficult.
- Voter purges: New York, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina conducted illegal voter purges resulting in millions of registered voters being erroneously removed, per the Brennan Center.
- Closed polling places: A 2016 examination of 381 counties in the South found 43% had reduced polling locations. A USA Today analysis found states closed thousands of polling places in 2016, the majority in Black or Hispanic communities. The Brennan Center reports that some Native Americans in South Dakota have to travel 150 miles to vote.
- Voter ID laws: Thirty-six states request or require voters to show a form of ID at the polls. North Carolina passed strict voter ID and other early-voting restrictions that in 2016 a federal appeals court found "target African Americans with almost surgical precision." In 2017, a federal judge ruled that a Texas voter ID law was passed with the intention of discriminating against the state's Hispanic and Black voters.
- Voting fees: In Florida, voters overwhelmingly passed a measure in 2018 to reinstate voting rights to felons who had served their time. State lawmakers then passed a law requiring such felons first to pay fines (averaging $1,000). A lower court ruled the fees amounted to a modern-day poll tax, but the law was upheld by a federal appeals court.
- Language barriers: In 2014, a federal court ruled that Alaska broke the law by failing to provide ballots in appropriate languages to Alaska Native tribes.
- Elusive ballots: In Montana, a state court last month struck down a law that set arbitrary limits on the number of people who can collect ballots on tribal land, saying it was overly burdensome for the state's Native American voters.
The bottom line: Requiring ID to vote or updating voter rolls aren't necessarily discriminatory. But implementation matters, and together they disproportionately affect non-white voters.
