The Long War Over Who Gets to Vote

Democracy, as a concept, has never meant one single thing. The Athenians who coined demokratia – rule by the people – would scarcely recognize what modern nations mean by it. In fifth-century Athens, democracy was direct: citizens gathered, debated, and voted with their own hands raised to the sky. No representatives, no intermediaries, no professional political class. And yet this celebrated fountainhead of the Western political tradition excluded the vast majority of people within its borders. Women had no voice. Slaves – perhaps a third of the population – were property. Foreign residents could live in Athens for generations and never cast a vote. The assembly could be swayed by demagogues, and it made catastrophic decisions – the Sicilian Expedition, the execution of the generals after Arginusae – that remind us direct democracy is no guarantee of wisdom.

Rome offers a different and equally instructive cautionary tale. The Republic developed elaborate voting assemblies – the Centuriate Assembly, the Tribal Assembly, the Plebeian Council – explicitly designed to give more influence to the wealthy. Vote-buying was so common that specific laws were passed against it, and those laws were so regularly ignored that their very existence testifies to the depth of the problem. The Republic endured for centuries under these conditions, but it died by degrees, as norms eroded, as political violence became normalized, as men like Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar discovered that the rules could be broken if you commanded enough legions. The lesson Rome teaches is that electoral systems can function imperfectly for a very long time – and then fail catastrophically when the underlying social compact that sustains them disintegrates.

The American Founders were keenly aware of both precedents. The Constitution they produced in Philadelphia in 1787 was deliberately, self-consciously not a pure democracy. The Electoral College was a buffer against mob rule and a concession to slaveholding states who wanted their political power amplified beyond their free population. The Senate gave equal representation to every state regardless of size. Senators were chosen by state legislatures until 1913. The franchise was left largely to the states, and most restricted voting to white men who owned property. The system was designed by elites, for a republic they intended to be governed by elites, with enough democratic input to maintain legitimacy but enough insulation to prevent what they called the “tyranny of the majority.”

The story of American democracy since the founding has been, in large part, the story of who gets to vote. Property requirements fell in the Jacksonian era. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of race – a promise systematically betrayed for nearly a century through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright terrorist violence across the South. The Nineteenth Amendment extended the franchise to women. But it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed in the wake of Bloody Sunday in Selma, that finally began to make the Fifteenth Amendment real. Its preclearance provision was arguably the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted. Each of these expansions was bitterly contested. Each was denounced as a threat to the integrity of the system, to the republic itself. And each is now regarded by the overwhelming majority of Americans as a self-evident moral advance.

The Electoral College has been a source of controversy from the beginning, but it has intensified in the modern era. Five times a president has won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. The 2000 election, decided by 537 votes in Florida after a battle culminating in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, left deep scars. The 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million but lost the Electoral College decisively, reignited demands for abolition on the left and fierce defenses on the right.

Gerrymandering is as old as the republic – the term was coined in 1812 – but modern gerrymandering bears little resemblance to its ancestor. With sophisticated algorithms and granular data, it is now possible to draw maps with surgical precision, packing opposition voters into a few safe districts and spreading the rest thinly across many. In 2018, Democrats in Wisconsin won 53 percent of the statewide vote but only 36 percent of seats. The Supreme Court, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims, effectively leaving the practice unchecked.

The role of money was transformed by Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which gave corporations and unions a First Amendment right to make unlimited independent expenditures, and the subsequent rise of super PACs. Total spending on federal elections exceeded $14 billion in 2020, more than double the amount in 2012. Voter ID laws became another battleground, with proponents citing commonsense fraud prevention and opponents pointing to disproportionate burdens on minority, elderly, and low-income voters.

The 2020 election and its aftermath represent the most severe crisis of electoral legitimacy in modern American history. The pandemic forced rapid expansion of mail-in voting, producing the “red mirage” and “blue shift” on election night. Trump and his allies seized on this pattern to claim the election was stolen, launching dozens of lawsuits, pressuring state officials, and ultimately encouraging the January 6th assault on the Capitol. The “Stop the Steal” movement, despite the complete absence of evidence of outcome-altering fraud, became an article of faith for a significant portion of the Republican electorate. The episode demonstrated with terrifying clarity that the legitimacy of elections depends not merely on the mechanics of counting votes but on the willingness of political leaders and their followers to accept results they do not like.

Ranked choice voting has emerged as one of the most discussed reforms. Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference; if no candidate wins a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those votes redistributed until one candidate prevails. Alaska and Maine have adopted it statewide. The broader movement – including approval voting, STAR voting, and proportional representation – reflects a growing sense that first-past-the-post is inadequate for a diverse, polarized society.

The through-line of this history is unmistakable. Every generation has fought about who gets to vote, how votes are counted, and whether the system is legitimate. These fights have sometimes been resolved peacefully. They have sometimes been resolved through violence – the Civil War was, at its core, a dispute about whether a democratic majority could restrict slavery, and the defeated side’s answer was to reject democracy itself. The fragility of self-governance is not a lesson Americans must learn from ancient history. It is written in American blood, in every generation, on American soil.

The question before us now is whether we can reform the system without destroying the shared commitment to peaceful self-governance that makes reform possible in the first place. Five Americans – separated by ideology but bound by the same democratic crisis – offer very different answers.