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It might be surprise you to learn, the original text of the US Constitution never limited voting rights to property owning White men. In fact, when the founders designed their document, they set no restrictions at all, allowing each state to determine their own election practices, including who may be eligible to vote.

By 1791, eleven of the first fourteen states permitted free Black men to participate in their elections. Only Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina explicitly limited voting to White men. The rest maintained property or tax paying requirements, which drastically limited overall engagement, preserving their exclusionary laws against Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans as well. The fourteenth, Vermont, abolished all such requisites by embedding universal male suffrage in their 1777 constitution, twelve years prior to the federal rendition. New Jersey then took things a step further in 1797, passing an electoral reform act to reaffirm & expand women’s voting rights, using “he or she” in the bill’s language as a safeguard.

Though the Naturalization Act of 1790 barred any nonWhite immigrants from obtaining citizenship, it did not prevent existing citizens from exercising their rights. Instead, state & local assemblies began a wave of disenfranchisement that wreaked havoc through northern legislatures. New York offers us one of the finest examples of early-nineteenth century changes:

Beginning in 1799, Governor John Jay signed a Gradual Abolition Act to end slavery in New York, stating all children born after July 4^(th) would be entirely free, with the exception of children born to slave mothers, who were still required to serve their mother’s owner until the age of twenty-eight for men, and twenty-five for women, at which point they would be free to their own volition.

By 1820, the slave population had been reduced from twenty-two thousand to ten thousand, with thirty thousand free Black citizens residing in the state. Fearing their increased voting power, the New York legislature imposed a $250 property constraint on Black voters, while simultaneously removing all property requirements for White men, resulting in only about sixteen Black men meeting the threshold through the entire state.

These changes were a result of shifts in the state government, from predominantly liberal Federalists to predominantly conservative Democratic-Republicans. A large reason being that the Federalists had continued their efforts to expand enfranchisement to the dismay of White male voters.

In New Jersey, women had become roughly twenty-five percent of the state’s voting bloc, serving as a cheap & easy scapegoat for all failed initiatives. After a competitive election was called for the Federalists, allegations of voter fraud started to arise. Proponents claimed precincts were not accurately verifying property or tax paying requirements, particularly for married women, who could not legally own property, and were therefore ineligible to vote. The legislature responded by passing a restrictive election law in 1807 that stripped women, immigrants, and nonWhite men of the ability to have a say in their government, while failing to show how marginalization resolved the issue in any way. Critics knew, it was because these groups overwhelmingly supported Federalist candidates.

Disenfranchisement efforts continued through the decade across the US and its territories. Existing states removed all religious restrictions by 1828, deviating further towards race-based discrimination. And every newly created state from then on banned Black suffrage, diminishing the electoral power of abolitionists candidates. Two decades later, the most racist Supreme Court in US history ruled that Black Americans could not be considered citizens, denying them any constitutional protections. Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) not only stripped Black people of all their rights, it also struck down the Missouri Compromise claiming congress had no constitutional authority to ban slavery in US territories, opening the entirety of the West to their evils.

Since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, slave catchers had been allowed to simply enter free states, kidnap any Black person they saw, and claim they were a runaway slave. As a consequence of the Dred Scott decision, Black Americans had now lost their ability to sue in federal court to regain their freedom. These hostile expansions by the Court would inevitably bring about the Civil War after backlash led to the rise of a new progressive liberal party, the Republicans.

By the mid-1850s, the conservative Democrats, formerly known as the Democratic-Republicans, had pushed White supremacy to its brink, built by Manifest Destiny & the Monroe Doctrine. Meanwhile, the centrist Whigs had become so divided on the issue of slavery, half the party was encouraging these heinous revisions more often than not.

Northern youths formed groups like the Wide Awakes, whose three hundred thousand members considered themselves wide awake to the horrors overtaking their nation. In 1854, the Republicans won a slew of congressional races through grassroots campaigns, rather than the established channels typically funded by wealthy donors. Their first presidential contender, John C Friemont, secured eleven states out of thirty-one, all in the North, effectively replacing the Whigs to counter the Democratic party’s rightwing dominance.

After the war, the South’s submission led to the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing birthright citizenship. And the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting male citizens from voting discriminations based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. However, the softening of Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction resulted in what would become known as the Jim Crow South, utilizing poll taxes & literacy tests to cut off the voting power of newly freed slaves, enabled by the federal government’s failure to enforce its own protections.

Bans on women’s suffrage remained in effect, with exceptions for wealthy widows, until the post-Reconstruction era. Between 1869 & 1913, five territories from Wyoming to Alaska granted women at least partial voting rights. The most progressive being Utah, which had enfranchised all women in 1870. Less than two years later, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in New York.

Unfortunately, the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 forcibly ended a seventeen-year experiment for Utahns while banning polygamy in the United States and its lands in holding. The Act did not prevent women voters everywhere from exercising their rights, focusing specifically on Utah in an attempt to limit the voting power of Mormons. But by the days of the suffragettes, twenty states had full or limited voting rights for women, typically enforced for White women only. The rest required civil liberties to be expanded in their racial or ethnic demographics as well.

Since Native Americans living on tribal lands were not considered a part of the US, they could only earn the right to vote by giving up their tribal affiliations. Though they shared similar persecutions, there was little unity between Black Americans and Native tribes, likely because the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations all participated in slavery, often using Black people to read the bible or as translators when meeting with agents of the US government. Out of over five hundred distinct groups, these were considered the ‘civilized’ tribes, and were encouraged to participate, even being gifted slaves at times. All had histories of enslaving smaller tribes, and largely viewed the practice as a way to assert their stature in society.

History has shown us, their slaves were far better treated compared to White owners, but tribe members still saw Black people as an inferior race. Some even sided with the Confederacy, forced to give up their slaves at the end of the war as well. Many of these slaves had their lineage on tribal lands go back a hundred and fifty years, virtually all having spent their entire lives in one place.

To honor their contributions, the tribal slaves were given full membership to their respective nations, causing a resentment from the purists, who often campaigned on Black exclusion. Black members ultimately lost their tribal citizenship & voting rights in the 1970s, requiring ten years and a US district court for them to regain their identities. Meanwhile, Native Americans suffered the same persecutions as Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, even after the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted them the full rights they’d been denied since the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Several states immediately moved to ban Native voters. Arizona turned them away at registration offices, claiming they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the state and thus were ineligible to vote regardless of citizenship; and did so for twenty years, until 1947, when the Supreme Court to overturn such bans, after twenty-five thousand Native American soldiers who served in World War II sued to exercise the rights they had fought to protect.

Asians suffered similar discriminations. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was overturned by the Supreme Court in United States v Wong Kim Ark (1898), but enforcement was spotty and did not cover every Asian group. In 1922, the Supreme Court decided that people of Japanese descent could not become citizens, doing the same in 1923 when they barred Indians from naturalization. Then again in 1925, ruling against Filipinos with the notable exception that they could earn their citizenship by joining the US Navy for a minimum of three years. It would take until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 for naturalization bias against Asian American petitioners to end. But these newly minted citizens saw few changes in their daily lives due to a lack of federalized civil protections.

In that regard, 1965 proved to be a profound year. In January, South Dakota became the deciding state, officially ratifying the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to ban poll taxes across all levels of government. On the last day of July, President Johnson signed the Medicare and Medicaid Act, expanding healthcare access for the elderly & vulnerable, calling it not an act of charity, but the right of every senior citizen, and a test of our willingness to work together. One week later, he signed the Voting Rights Act into law, guaranteeing suffrage protections for all Americans by enforcing the Fifteenth & Nineteenth Amendments, requiring approval through the DOJ anytime states with a history of voter discrimination changed their rules or practices. Two months later, he added the Immigration and Nationality Act to his list of presidential achievements, abolishing the racial quota system that favored European immigrants. All of these came on the heels of his greatest accomplishment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which segregation was forcibly dismantled after he refused to accept the original watered down variation pushed by Congress. Four hundred years of racial dominance had been shamed into the shadows by leaders who understood the importance of equity among all people.

For nearly fifty years, the preclearance requirement guaranteed transparency, and offered an effective recourse for prejudicial obstructions. Even conservative administrations understood its importance. In 1982, President Reagan signed the Voting Rights Act expansions, shifting the preclearance standard from intent to effect, meaning the author’s intention was no longer relevant in determining bias if the law caused real world harms. Ten years later, George H. Bush signed the Voting Rights Act of 1992, expanding the bilingual assistance requirements before his son, George W. Bush, signed a twenty-five year reauthorization. It passed with a 393 to 33 margin in the House, and 98 to 0 in the Senate.

That sense of duty to all Americans has largely been eroded by a half-century long conservative legal movement taking root, centered around packing the Supreme Court with members of the ironically named Federalist Society, who represent the antithesis of what the true Federalist sought to achieve at the nation’s founding.

Their first big win came in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010) when the Court nullified an FEC rule that barred corporations & private groups from indirectly spending unlimited sums of money to support their preferred political candidate. This decision created the modern era super PACs so brazenly buying our elections. Citizens United is considered the most destructive revision to campaign finance law since the 1970s reforms.

Then began the Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the long-awaited opinion for Shelby County v Holder (2013) decades after his vocal opposition to the ‘82 VRA expansions. While serving as a staff attorney during the Reagan administration, Roberts claimed that many lawmakers were misled into believing it was a simple extension, shamelessly diverting responsibility away from these elected officials who never bothered to read the legislation before binding our nation to its standards. Roberts has since made it his mission in life to restore the southern right to racism.

Writing the Shelby opinion himself, he could not find a constitutional leg to stand on, because Congress’ authority to enforce the Fifteenth & Nineteenth Amendments is irrefutable. Instead, Roberts claimed that racism is no longer a predominant issue in American politics, against all evidence to the contrary. Without the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as its basis, the Court struck down Section 4(b)’s formula to determine which states were subject to preclearance, calling the data it relied upon outdated. Now without a means to measure bias, Section 5 was left toothless as well.

The very next day, Texas reissued a voter ID law already rejected by the courts two years prior, proudly calling it the strictest in the nation. Though it was again struck down by a district court judge, and upheld by the Fifth circuit, no injunctions were issued and a slightly altered variation remains in effect to this day. Since the Shelby decision, twenty-nine states have enacted ninety-four restrictive voting laws, primarily targeting groups through partisan affiliations. Something the Roberts court made clear is not their concern.

In 2019, the Chief Justice delivered a 5-4 majority opinion for Rucho v Common Cause, stating that matters of political gerrymandering are not for courts to consider. A three-judge panel had already struck down North Carolina’s 2016 congressional map, which gave Republicans ten of the thirteen congressional seats available despite only winning 53% of the vote. Justice Kagan’s dissent highlighted the fundamental importance of protecting the right to vote and that, by not intervening, the Court has encouraged states to engage in suppressive behavior. Roberts said there is no “limited and precise standard” to analyze when political gerrymandering has gone too far, and Kagan made it clear, this was the opportunity to create one.

Recent voter suppression strategies have focused on redistricting, including a brazen call by the President of the United States for his coconspirators to sabotage the 2026 midterms through partisan gerrymandering. They envisioned this strategy as a decisive way to wipe out their Democratic competition in half a dozen states, and it might have worked, if not for the growing economic frustrations that turned many strong leads into tossups with the real test coming in November.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continued its onslaught of the VRA in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee (2021), fundamentally rewriting Section 2 by narrowing its interpretation. This is where Chief Justice Roberts’ hatred of the ‘82 amendments comes full circle. It started when Arizona officials manufactured a crisis that required extreme solutions. The first was a civil statute forcing election officials to discard any ballots received from voters registered to another precinct, nullifying the exact purpose of voting provisionally. The second made it a criminal offense to engage in ballot collection, where nonprofits assist rural & Native voters by dropping off their election materials to authorized precincts.

The 9^(th) Circuit struck down the Arizona laws as a violation of the ‘82 Amendments to Section 2, meaning their intentions were irrelevant when the harm so clearly disenfranchised rural Black, Latino, and Native voters. But remember, a young John Roberts despised the ‘82 expansions, oddly calling the legal analysis of voting law effects a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Once again, he had no legal leg to stand on, so the majority decided to do a narrower reading of the VRA, focusing on Section 2(b): violations only occur when “the political processes leading to nomination or election” are not “equally open to participation”. Since voting remained technically available, the impossibilities caused by circumstance were acceptable regardless of overwhelming harm to specific groups. Their reading was essentially a pencil designed to say “Don’t Do Drugs” getting shaved down to the point where it says “Do Drugs”.

Still, the Roberts court was not finished with its attacks. In Louisiana v Callais (2026), the majority destroyed most of the authority remaining in Section 2. Louisiana had redrawn its maps after the 2020 census, resulting in only one out of six districts having a majority of Black voters, who sued on the grounds of vote dilution since Black Americans make up one-third of the state’s population. A federal district court agreed, ordering Louisiana to redraw its maps and create a second majority Black district. After the state complied, a group of twelve White voters sued, claiming the new map discriminated against them on the basis of race.

To no one’s surprise, the Roberts court invalidated the state’s new maps, calling the original dilutions acceptable by Section 2 standards. This meant that the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by considering race without a compelling government interest to do so. In essence, Louisiana calculatedly split Black neighborhoods across White dominated constituencies, and the Court said such transparent distortions do not qualify as race-based discrimination. It has been seen as the final nail in the coffin for a landmark piece of legislation designed to ensure all citizens have a voice.

Most recently, Justice Kavanagh oversaw a petition to reverse the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision in People Not Politicians v Onder (2026). The legislature passed a 2025 congressional map that divided Kansas City across several deep red districts. But this map never legally went into effect by virtue of a rule in the state’s constitution allowing citizens to suspend any law challenged through a referendum. After successfully collecting over three hundred thousand signatures, the Missouri Secretary of State unlawfully delayed their petition, before rejecting it entirely during their August 4^(th) primary, which resulted in a lawsuit filed the same day. It would take a month for the state’s highest court to revert the maps for the general election, calling the confusion a problem of the secretary’s own making.

A House Republican then petitioned the US Supreme Court for an Emergency Stay Application, requesting a reversal of the midcycle reversion. Because each Supreme Court justice oversees emergency petitions for a select few states, the decision was Justice Kavanagh’s to make. In a surprise upset for state officials, Kavanagh rejected the appeal finalizing their reversal to the 2022 maps. There is now a filing in the 8^(th) Circuit, unlikely to change the outcome.

Little victories such as these provide hope in uncertain times, reliant on a centuries’ old strength to remind us, we are Americans by mindset & shared experience. It does no decent person among us any good to sanctify the notion that this has ever been a purely White nation where others had no rights. Our histories are covered in deceitful myths to erase the connections nonWhite Americans feel towards their country. Equity is not a modern concept, nor does it stray from the founders’ intentions. Voting is a sacred duty pledged to us all.