The Constitution has never contained a broad, affirmative right to vote, which helps explain why voting in America has always depended so much on where you live.
Some states expanded the vote earlier than we typically remember. Vermont, for example, adopted a broad franchise before the federal Constitution existed. Others expanded the franchise and later narrowed it: Revolutionary Pennsylvania extended voting rights to taxpaying men before limiting the vote to white men in 1838. Taken together, these examples show that American voting rights have never moved in one direction for everyone at once.
Let’s start with Vermont, one of the earliest examples of a state taking an unusually expansive view of who should have the vote. In 1777, before the federal Constitution existed, Vermont adopted its own, eliminating both property and taxpaying requirements for voting. Why? Because of a man whose name you’ve probably heard before: Ethan Allen.
A painting depicts Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys demanding the surrender of British forces at Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. Allen’s militia is better remembered for its Revolutionary War exploits, but its fight against New York’s authority also helped create the breakaway political community that adopted Vermont’s unusually broad early voting rules. (Getty Images)Allen led what historian Alexander Keyssar describes in his book “The Right to Vote” as an “unruly political—and military—process” involving his militia group, the Green Mountain Boys. Allen’s men roamed what ultimately became Vermont back when New York still claimed the territory, resisting New York’s authority by stopping sheriffs, intimidating New York-backed settlers, burning buildings, and sometimes flogging opponents.
Their campaign was not specifically about expanding the franchise. It began as a fight over land, sovereignty, and New York’s authority in the territory that became Vermont. But by helping create a breakaway political community outside New York’s control, the Green Mountain Boys also helped create the conditions for a very different constitution — one that rejected New York’s property-based voting system and allowed any adult man who took the Freeman’s Oath to vote.
Then came the U.S. Constitution. The 1787 document did not grant anyone the right to vote, instead deferring to states to determine the makeup of their own electorate. Whoever a state allowed to vote for its own legislature could also vote for members of Congress from that state. States, not the federal government, were left to decide who “the people” were. Vermont, therefore, could continue to coexist with neighboring New York despite radically different approaches to the franchise.
That flexibility produced inconsistency. In 1780, Massachusetts dropped racial exclusions for voting but kept property ownership at the center of political rights. That meant a free Black man who met the property requirement could vote while a poor white man who did not meet it could not. Property, race, gender, dependency, and local law interacted unevenly in the early American electorate.
Some states also gave voting rights and then took them away. In New Jersey, the state’s 1776 Constitution and a 1790 election law allowed some property-owning women and Black men to vote. That changed in 1807, when the Legislature limited voting to “free, white male” citizens.
An 1808 article in the Trenton Federalist said the new law “restricted all that has made our elections disagreeable, contentious and corrupt; all Females and Negroes being now deprived of a vote, who, not being eligible to nor much acquainted with the affairs of government, need not any longer be made use of to answer a party purpose.”
The same state-by-state experimentation complicates another assumption we often make now: that citizenship and voting have always been inseparable.
For much of American history, they were not. Some territories and newer western states used the franchise as an inducement to settlers. If they wanted people to move west, build towns, work land, pay taxes, and bind their futures to a new place, the vote was often part of the offer.
Wisconsin became the clearest example. In 1848, it allowed immigrants to vote if they had lived in the United States for two years and filed papers declaring their intent to become citizens. Michigan and Indiana soon followed, as did the Oregon and Minnesota territories. Later, similar rules spread across parts of the South and West.
But here, too, societal pressures prompted change. States began repealing noncitizen voting laws in the late 19th century. The backlash accelerated around World War I, amid rising xenophobia and suspicion of immigrants’ loyalty. Arkansas was the last state to end the practice, doing so in 1926.
Which brings us to the arguments over voting that Votebeat covers now.
For much of American history, the central question around voting rights was who could get through the door: who could register, who could cast a ballot, and who was excluded by law. But there is another question on the other side of the franchise. In 1976, legal scholar Gerhard Casper argued that American debates had long focused on “the right to be a voter,” rather than the harder problem of representation. Voting, he wrote, “is supposedly performed with a goal in mind — representation; but voting does not in itself necessarily entail representation.”
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 tried to answer both problems. It gave federal force to the principle that citizens could not be denied the ballot because of race, and Section 2 later became one of the main tools for challenging election rules and maps that diluted minority voters’ ability to turn votes into representation.
That issue is at the core of the modern fights over gerrymandering. A voter can be eligible, registered, and able to cast a ballot, and still live under maps that weaken the political power of that vote.
Louisiana is the latest example. After years of litigation over whether Black voters in the state had a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district and narrowed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting. Many voting rights scholars and advocates have described the decision as a major rollback — not because it removes anyone from the voter rolls, but because it changes what legal protection remains when votes are diluted by district lines.
That is not the same thing as states limiting or even taking away voting rights based on property requirements, gender, or citizenship status. But it belongs in the same history. The rules change. The line moves. And sometimes, as American history keeps reminding us, it moves backward.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.
What 250 Years of Voting Rights Battles Tell Us About Today was originally published by Votebeat and is republished with permission.
