In August 2024, the State of Texas purged over a million voters from its voter rolls a few months before the November presidential election; Texas Governor Greg Abbott claimed that it was done in the name of election integrity. Although less than half a million of those purged were for legitimate reasons, such as death and losing the right to vote due to a felony conviction, the other 460,000 voters were removed after being placed on the suspension list, which occurs when the government believes that the voters have moved out of their registered address, or if voters don’t vote in 2 consecutive election cycles. These actions have been remarked as making voting even more difficult for a state that is already the 5th most difficult state to vote in. This act isn’t an isolated occurrence, however, and it isn’t even a recent phenomenon. When looking at the history of the US, the element of democracy this nation prides itself on was not always steadfast nor fully supported. Even during its earliest years, voting for American citizens was a difficult task in of itself due to a myriad of laws, rules, and regulations that determined who could vote.
Democracy refers to a system of government based on “rule by the people”, but when we apply this definition to the United States, it is evident that the US does not completely meet the requirements for being a full democracy. Whilst there are free and fair elections, multiple political parties, universal suffrage, and multiple sources of information, the decision-making process is largely kept out of the hands of the American populace. The U.S. is struggling to maintain its status as a democratic country; following numerous disenfranchisement efforts across the states, America has experienced democratic backsliding–a slap in the face for the so-called “beacon of democracy”. Voters are fighting to protect their ability to exercise their democratic powers, a seemingly endless fight considering the history of voting rights in American history.
When we consider the historical and continuous present attempts to impede the right to vote, we have to ask: Is the United States really a democracy?
Even at its birth, the U.S. was not a democracy – it wasn’t even intended to be; the Founding Fathers debated heavily over the system of government that would run this new, forward-thinking nation, as opposed to old-fashioned European monarchism. They eventually settled on a republican system of government, rather than a democracy. On one hand, a republic was a hard split from the old-fashioned European monarchies, but it also prevented direct democracy, which the founding fathers feared would benefit the poor against the rich. As such, the US was not founded with a political system that would allow democracy to fully prosper – a characteristic that would continue to plague the nation for centuries to come.
Today, it may be hard for some people to vote in certain states due to disenfranchisement legislation, but the early United States outright barred a majority of people from voting at all. From the very beginning, most Americans were left out of the political process due to the strict voting laws that only enabled “white, landowning males over the age of twenty-one.” As history progressed, the American system of government slowly evolved to resemble more like a democracy. After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was passed, allowing African American men to vote. The 19th Amendment was later passed in 1920 to extend suffrage to women, and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to reaffirm Black suffrage. Finally, the passage of the 26th Amendment brought down the voting age restriction to 18 years. After centuries of restricting and attacking voting rights, the United States finally met the requirement of “universal suffrage” in order to start even remotely resembling a democracy – in fact, “The United States doesn’t become a good democracy until after 1970.”
Even after the establishment of universal suffrage, there are still significant institutional barriers preventing people from participating in elections easily. Registration requirements and certain voting laws are often targeted towards certain demographic groups to make it harder for them to vote. The case of Shelby County v Holder has made it easier for states to pass certain voting laws that hinder specific demographics by removing the preclearance formula in sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the Supreme Court argued that the preclearance law was outdated and was no longer necessary, as discrimination in voting had largely vanished. Political Science Professor Joseph Gershtenson stated that “Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin have also enacted legislation that makes it harder to register to vote,” while also affirming that “voter registration is already a significant hurdle,” and that “some of the increased restrictions specifically [target] college students” who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Additionally, Professor Zoltan Hajnal emphasizes that, “Voter ID laws serve as effective barriers that limit the legitimate participation of racial and ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups,” demonstrating how the effort to suppress certain demographic groups from voting persists into the modern era.
Not only do voter suppression efforts have a political rationale to them – preventing college students and minority groups from voting largely hurts the Democratic party for the benefit of the Republicans – but there is also a racial aspect to it. Professor Barbara Harris Combs argues that these efforts are carried out to maintain and operate racial hierarchies, which, “…is at the very core of systemic racism.”
All of these examples highlight the continuous effort to delegitimize and suppress voters for political gains, mainly by conservative Republicans. This has an extremely adverse impact on the rights of voters in America, which has widespread and deeply impactful political implications. The biggest example is Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that “Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if his office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters.” Even to this day, there are countless attempts made by political actors to weaken the right to vote – attempts that we, as American citizens, must prevent at all costs at the ballot box.
The aggregation of laws designed to suppress voters has led to democratic backsliding in the U.S.. Professor Jacob Gurmbach writes that multiple think tanks view the U.S. as, “slipping toward ‘mixed regime’ or ‘illiberal democracy’ status,” a statement corroborated by the Economist Group, an index measuring the quality of democracy across different countries. In this measurement, the U.S. is ranked 29 as of 2023, one spot ahead of Israel, but behind the likes of Greece and Chile.
The United States is classified as a flawed democracy rather than a full democracy, further highlighting its democratic backsliding. However, it is important to note that due to the federal system of the U.S., voting laws differ by state, which leads to variance in voter suppression across the US. The Cost of Voting Index, a measurement of how difficult it is to vote in each state, lists states in order of easiest to hardest to vote in, with Republican red states trending towards the bottom. This corroborates the earlier argument of voter restriction laws being used for political gains; numerous red states attempt to prevent racial minorities and other marginalized communities from voting because they know that these demographics tend to vote Democrat, thus solidifying their political power on the state level.
When considering the historical nature of American Republicanism, the numerous restrictions on voting throughout American history, and the modern-day disenfranchisement effort targeted toward minorities, it is clear that the US is not at all the “beacon of democracy” it supposedly represents. Not only is it difficult to vote in the U.S., but the republican system of government doesn’t guarantee that the political desires of the voters are accurately and continuously upheld by a representative who has a constituency of hundreds of thousands of other people. If the United States is to truly be a democratic country, it must undergo far-reaching reform to ensure that voting rights are upheld and protected across every part of the country.