Paul Collins at The Believer:
I suppose I’d once imagined the history of American voting rights as a steady march toward greater equality. But the more you look at American suffrage, the more it feels like a visit to the Winchester Mystery House: there are bafflingly constructed chambers, grand and glorious halls, and stairways that lead nowhere. To begin with, there’s no specific right-to-vote clause in our Constitution, so the US lacks what is now an obvious provision for a modern democracy to include. Instead, there are the famed inalienable rights, and descriptions of how elections work, which imply and essentially necessitate a freely voting populace; plus there are many subsequent amendments, federal acts, and court decisions. But otherwise the Constitution hands over voting and voter qualifications to states. For many decades, states didn’t have laws barring the intellectually disabled from voting: they didn’t need to, because they allowed hardly any citizens to vote. For the election of George Washington in 1788 and 1789, Massachusetts required that voters be men aged twenty-one or older, and possessing an estate worth at least sixty British pounds. Most states had similar laws. That’s why, in a country of nearly four million people, just 43,782 votes were cast—slightly more than 1 percent of the population.
more here.
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