Articles In This Issue Page 1: Pat Farrell Page 3: SABOR Column Page 7: The Way I See It Featuring: Cathey Meyer
Page 15: Associate Spotlight Featuring: Chicago Title Page 17: Guest Column Featuring Paul Owens, Esq.
Page 23: Newsflash
Vol.VI, No.10
www.realestatenewsline.com
October 2020
Do You Exercise Your Right To Vote? By: Pat Farrell
PRSRT STD U.S. Postage PAID San Antonio, Texas Permit #1416
It is historically significant that the right to vote has been a subject of contention almost since the United States was first established as an independent nation in 1776. Most of us today are happy to call voting just that (voting) but when one starts to research this activity they will find a number of synonyms still in use that include words like suffrage, enfranchisement (disenfranchisement), and simply put, ballot access, to define the right to vote. Drafting our country’s laws began in mid-1776, was completed in late 1777 and was finally ratified by all of the then 13 states in March of 1781. This document was called the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” which gave states the right to determine their own rules governing who is eligible to vote and the right to control taxation, and it afforded the central government only limited powers. On March 4, 1789, the newly adopted U.S.
Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union and has been the law of the land since then, granting the central government powers greater than those they had before. Exercising their entitlement under Article I of the U.S. Constitution most states, at that time, limited voting rights to white men who owned property and paid taxes. The Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, while they granted free white males born outside of the United States the right to become citizens, they did not automatically entitle them with the right to vote. During the years between 1792 and 1856 the states gradually abolished the property requirements for their voters, but during that same period, while some black men had previously had voting privileges, at least in most of the northern states, those rights were later abolished in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the 1820 election 108,359 votes were cast and as restrictions continued to ease in most of the states that number had risen to 2,412,694 by the 1840 election. Regarding their laws governing voting rights many factors entered into the make-up of a state’s laws depending upon where these states were located. The southern states of the United States of America, those that at one time were members of the Confederation States of America, continued to enforce laws like the “Jim Crow” laws that were designed to disenfranchise African-Americans and maintain racial segregation in schools and all public facilities (bathrooms and restaurants) and on all forms of transportation. According to Wikipedia (their words – not mine) “Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. These laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by
white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by black people during the Reconstruction period. The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.” Setting the stage for further government intervention into the voting rights of Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868 guaranteeing citizenship to all male persons born or naturalized in the United States. This was followed by addition of the Fifteenth Amendment which prevents states from denying anyone the right to vote on the grounds of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Between the Jim Crow laws with literacy exams and poll taxes being assessed it was easy to see why it was almost impossible for African Americans or “poor whites” to afford to vote. It wasn’t until 1887 that citizenship was granted to Native Americans by the Dawes Act, so long as they agreed to give up their relationship with their tribes. And, in 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment was added to the Constitution permitting voters the right to elect their state Senators rather than leaving that to the state legislatures, as had been the previous policy. It did not go unnoticed that the disallowed discrimination against voting was specifically for males and made no mention of the female gender, so the struggles of women for suffrage continued to move forward. This fight was actually begun earlier by women who were originally participating in the anti-slavery movement, so once the Fifteenth Amendment was passed they were free to concentrate on the plight of women and began an earnest attempt to secure the vote for them in 1848 at a convention in Seneca Falls, NY orchestrated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Over the years other women joined in as the struggle continued and while some of those protesting were deemed peaceful, others could be somewhat militant. Finally, in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was added to the U.S. Constitution and the long battle for woman’s suffrage was over. By 1925 all Native Americans were now granted citizenship regardless of their tribal connections; however, some western states continued to bar them from voting in continued defiance of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1925. It wasn’t until 1943 that Chinese born U.S. residents were granted both the right to citizenship and the right to vote. In 1948 Arizona and New Mexico finally extended full voting rights to Native Americans, yet it wasn’t until 1961 that residents of Washington D.C. were afforded the right to vote in Presidential elections. During the period between 1962 and 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court made several important decisions that supported the concept of “one man, one vote” and an opinion from then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren said, “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” By 1964 the poll tax was prohibited as a condition required to vote by addition of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution and through passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act all minorities were then granted voting privileges. Whereas voting eligibility had always required that one be at least 21 years of age, the Vietnam War protests during the 1960s, that soldiers who were old enough to fight for the country should also be eligible to vote, led to addition of the Twenty-sixth