In the United States, voter suppression is a historical and present occurrence. Efforts to prevent people from exercising their right to vote vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 improved voting access.
In the 21st century, voter suppression takes varied forms, including voter ID mandates, restrictions on vote-by-mail, penalizing the provision of water and other sustenance to those waiting in line to vote, and gerrymandering to limit the effectiveness of a group’s votes. The 2013 US Supreme Court ruling of Shelby County v. Holder, which weakened the Voting Rights Act, has enabled substantial voter suppression. Historically and presently, instances of voter suppression are primarily driven by state-level efforts, rather than federal policymaking. Proponents of voter suppression efforts often justify their efforts by raising concerns over electoral integrity, while opponents argue that these constitute bad faith given the lack of voter fraud evidence in the United States.
Suffrage
Black and Native American suffrage
The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 guaranteed the right to vote to men of all races, including former slaves. Initially, this resulted in high voter turnout among African-Americans in the South. In the 1880 United States presidential election, a majority of eligible African-American voters cast a ballot in every Southern state except for two. In eight Southern states, Black turnout was equal to or greater than White turnout. At the end of the Reconstruction era, Southern states began implementing policies to suppress Black voters. After 1890, less than 9,000 of Mississippi's 147,000 eligible African-American voters were registered to vote, or about 6%. Louisiana went from 130,000 registered African-American voters in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904 (about a 99% decrease). Between the end of Reconstruction era and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the rights of black voters were frequently infringed upon.
The decision on Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831 meant that Native people would essentially not have a right to vote, until the passage of the 15th amendment, when certain ground was gained towards enfranchisement. Native Americans gained more ground with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Poll taxes Poll taxes were used to disenfranchise voters, particularly African-Americans and poor whites in the South. Poll taxes started in the 1890s, requiring eligible voters to pay a fee before casting a ballot. Some poor whites were grandfathered in if they had an ancestor who voted before the Civil War era. This meant that they were exempt from paying the tax. Eleven Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia), as well as several outside the South, imposed poll taxes. The poll tax mechanism varied on a state-by-state basis; in Alabama, the poll tax was cumulative, meaning that a man had to pay all poll taxes due from the age of twenty-one onward in order to vote. In other states, poll taxes had to be paid for several years before being eligible to vote. Enforcement of poll tax laws was patchy. Election officials had the discretion whether or not to ask for a voter's poll tax receipt.
The constitutionality of the poll tax was upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1937 Breedlove v. Suttles and again affirmed in 1951 by a federal court in Butler v. Thompson. Poll taxes began to wane in popularity despite judicial affirmations, with five Southern states keeping poll taxes by 1962 (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia). The poll tax was officially prohibited in 1964 by the Twenty-fourth Amendment.
Literacy tests Like poll taxes, literacy tests were primarily used to disenfranchise poor or African-American voters in the South. African-American literacy rates lagged behind White literacy rates until 1940. Literacy tests were applied unevenly: property owners were often exempt, as well as those who would have had the right to vote (or whose ancestors had the right to vote) in 1867, which was before the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Some states exempted veterans of the Civil War from tests. Literacy tests varied in difficulty, with African-Americans often given more rigorous tests. In Macon County, Alabama in the late 1950s, for example, at least twelve whites who had not finished elementary school passed the literacy test, while several college-educated African-Americans were failed. Literacy tests were prevalent outside the South as well, as they were seen as keeping society's undesirables (the poor, immigrants, or the uninformed) from voting; twenty states still had literacy tests after World War II, including seven Southern states, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. A 1970 Amendment to the Voting Rights Act prohibited the use of literacy tests for determining voting eligibility.
Women's suffrage Momentum for women's suffrage in the United States started in the 1840s. Organizations began in 1869 and eventually merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) with Susan B. Anthony as its leading force. Suffragists made several attempts to vote in the early 1870s in hopes to convince the United States Supreme Court to give women the right to vote. The group fought for suffrage on a state-by-state basis. At the turn of the 19th century, Carrie Chapman Catt prioritized leading the two-million-member NAWSA to advocate for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. After a series of votes in Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. The amendment states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
Youth suffrage
The twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution created a floor where anyone 18 years or older could vote, but gave states and localities the option to extend the franchise by lowering the voting age to even younger citizens.
Suffrage of the elderly and disabled Suffrage for Americans with disabilities & Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act
Types of voter suppression
Voter suppression can take illegal forms such as voter intimidation, coercion or threats. Scholar Michael Smith, a professor of political science at Emporia State University, writes that Democratic Party-aligned activists also describe state laws that make it more difficult to vote as amounting to voter suppression: "While Republicans cry voter fraud, Democrats counter by charging voter suppression. The true cause of these new laws, they argue, is not to curb voter fraud, which study after study has shown to be extraordinarily rare. Instead, Democrats say, the true goal is voter suppression."
Purging of eligible voters from the rolls
Database matching In 1998, Florida created the Florida Central Voter File with the stated purpose of combatting vote fraud documented in the 1997 Miami mayoral election. At least 1,100 people (~2x than the margin of victory) were wrongly purged from voter registration lists in Florida ahead of the 2000 election because their names were similar to those of convicted felons, who were not allowed to vote at that time under Florida law. According to the Palm Beach Post, African-Americans accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls through this effort but were only about 11% of Florida's voters. However, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, nearly 89% of felons convicted in Florida were black at the time; therefore, a purge of convicted felons could be expected to include a disproportionately high number of blacks. The Post added that "a review of state records, internal e-mails of DBT employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted."
In 2008, more than 98,000 registered Georgia voters were removed from the roll of voters because of discrepancies in computer records of their identification information. Some 4,500 voters had to prove their citizenship to regain their right to vote. Georgia was challenged for requesting more Social Security-based verifications than any other state—about 2 million voters in total. An attorney involved in the lawsuit said that since the letters were mailed within 90 days of the election, Georgia violated federal law. The director of the ACLU's Georgia Voting Rights Project said, "They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those matches to send these letters out to voters. They're using a systematic purging procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws, if people who are properly eligible are getting improperly challenged and purged." Elise Shore, a regional attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), agreed the letters appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election. "People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens, including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore. "They're being told they're not eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been checked and approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and that we know has flaws in it." Secretary of State Karen Handel denied that the removal of voters' names was an instance of voter suppression.
In 2024, more than three thousand people were stripped of their voter registration in Alabama after they were identified as having a "noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security". Only a fraction of them are confirmed as ineligible to vote, with the majority of them flagged because they received their driver's license or ID as a foreign national which are valid for eight years regardless of these individuals are later naturalized. More than 700 individuals are confirmed as having citizenship and eligible to vote.
Caging lists
Caging lists have been used by political parties to challenge potential voters registered with other political parties. A political party sends first-class mail marked "do not forward" to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable, the mailing organization uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the voter should be removed from the list of registered voters. If this challenge is made at the polls on Election Day, a challenged voter might have to vote a provisional ballot.
Purges conducted by staff Between November 2015 and early 2016, over 120,000 voters were dropped from rolls in Brooklyn, New York. Officials stated that the purge was a mistake and that those dropped represented a "broad cross-section" of the electorate. A WNYC analysis found that the purge had disproportionately affected majority-Hispanic districts. The board reinstated all voters in time for the 2016 congressional primary. The Board of Elections subsequently suspended the Republican appointee connected to the purge, but kept on her Democratic counterpart.
Hurdles to casting a vote
Limitations on early and absentee voting