Never a Straight Line: Voting Rights in America—and Cleveland
Who actually gets to vote in American society, and how have voting rights changed over time?
The history of voting rights in the United States has been anything but a straight path. Every historical expansion of rights has been followed by efforts to narrow them, and each victory has come from organizing, litigation, and sacrifice by those excluded. Cleveland, shaped by abolitionist activism, immigrant settlement, groundbreaking Black political achievements, and contentious contemporary elections, illustrates how national political and social struggles are expressed in local communities.
Since its inception in 1868, YWCA Greater Cleveland has worked to ensure that all Clevelanders understand their voting rights and how elections impact elements of everyday life, such as school funding, public safety, and health care policy, by providing venues and tools for residents to register to vote, update existing registrations, and review upcoming ballot measures.
The conflict around who gets to vote dates back to the earliest days of U.S. history. When the United States Constitution was ratified in 1788, it said very little about who could vote. That choice was largely left to the states, most of which restricted the right to vote to white male landowners. Some states also issued religious tests to ensure that only Christian men could vote. Since this time, our country's story has been a long, contested widening of that circle. The widening was never automatic or permanent.
During the early part of the 19th century, state legislatures begin to drop the property requirement for voting. Yet, the same period closed doors elsewhere: several states that had allowed free Black men to vote explicitly removed that right. Women, enslaved people, and most Native Americans were excluded entirely. Later, during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which barred denying voting rights based on race. The amendment was ratified by the states in 1870. However, in the decades that followed, many states, particularly in the South, used a range of barriers—such as poll taxes and literacy tests—to deliberately limit voting among Black and Native American men, immigrants, and other groups.
The women's suffrage movement, launched in 1848, took more than seventy years to gain legal legitimacy via the 19th Amendment in 1920. Even then, however, many Black women in the South, and Native, Asian, and Latina women elsewhere, were still blocked from casting votes. Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1924, but some states still denied them the right to vote. Additionally, Asian immigrants were largely barred from naturalization until the mid-twentieth century.
During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, unequal voting rights came to a head as many states, particularly in the South, dug in on policies aimed at suppressing the vote among minority groups, new citizens, and low-income populations. In 1965, the year after these injustices were addressed in the 24th Amendment, activists organized protest marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery to spotlight the issue of voting rights. The first marchers were attacked by police and others on a day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” After a second march was cut short, a throng of thousands finally completed the journey to Montgomery, drawing nationwide attention to the issue. The resultant Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory tests and required federal preclearance of changes in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, and the 26th Amendment of 1971 lowered the voting age to 18. Registration in the South rose dramatically within a few years.
The fight for equal voting rights has continued into the 21st century. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down the formula determining which jurisdictions needed preclearance, and states have since passed new rules with heightened demands regarding voter ID, registration, and early voting, which supporters defend as protecting election integrity and critics say suppress turnout.
Ohio's story mirrors the national narrative, with some distinctive turns. Our state's early constitutions limited voting to white men, and Ohio's "Black Laws" imposed heavy restrictions on free Black residents. Yet Ohio was also an abolitionist stronghold. In Oberlin, John Mercer Langston was among the first Black Americans elected to office in the country when he became town clerk in 1855, after a court ruled him legally “white enough” to serve under Ohio law because of his mixed ancestry. This ruling demonstrated how absurd and arbitrary racial classification in voting was. Ohio ratified the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, though only after initially rejecting it.
Ohio voters rejected women’s suffrage amendments in 1912, 1914, and 1917, even though organizers in Cleveland and across the state campaigned robustly in favor bringing to vote to women. However, in 1919, ahead of national ratification, Ohio ratified the 19th Amendment in 1919. Cleveland's Florence Allen, who had advocated for women’s suffrage, became the first woman to serve on a state supreme court in the country in 1922. She later served on the federal bench.
Cleveland's 20th-century politics were shaped by the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of Black Southerners to the city, along with waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Neighborhoods formed political blocs, and ward-based machines courted them. The culmination of Black political organizing in Cleveland came in 1967, when Carl Stokes was elected mayor, becoming the first Black mayor of a major American city. His victory depended on Black turnout in neighborhoods like Hough and Glenville and on a coalition that included some white voters.
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have been central to current struggles over election administration. Long lines and provisional ballot disputes during the 2004 presidential election made Ohio a national symbol of voting disputes. In 2008, the state allowed a "Golden Week" of overlapping early voting and registration, which was popular, particularly in Cuyahoga County, but the legislature later eliminated it, and litigation over early voting hours, absentee procedures, and voter roll maintenance has continued. In Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018), the Supreme Court upheld Ohio's process of removing infrequent voters from the rolls after a series of notices, a decision critics argued could disproportionately affect urban residents. Ohio also tightened its photo ID requirements in 2022.
Disputes over voting rights remain in play today. Federal legislation calling to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship and obligate states to actively seek out and remove noncitizens from existing voter registration lists, while stalled in Congress, has repeatedly passed in the House of Representatives. Ohio, along with 11 other states, has independently passed similar laws at the local level, and joins New Hampshire, Wyoming, Utah, and South Dakota in fully enforcing voter documentary proof of citizenship.
Our Vote is Our Power
Healthy democracies where people vote in higher numbers lead to healthy communities because elected officials are accountable to voters. Americans have fought long and hard to secure voting rights, and today it is more important than ever that we exercise our right to vote on or before November 3rd.