“Voter Apathy,” Conditional Citizenship, and Sculpting the Electorate after the 1965 Voting Rights Act

Sunday, January 8, 2023: 11:00 AM
Congress Hall A (Loews Philadelphia Hotel)
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Cornell University
This paper explores the profound contestation and anxiety about U.S. democracy that marked the decades after 1965 Voting Rights Act. Just as elites announced the ultimate victory of democracy and realization of American founding ideals, political participation plummeted, inequality soared, and faith in government plunged downward.

To counter these trends, activists fought to reform registration requirements, enact campaign finance reform, abolish felon disenfranchisement, lower the voting age, and alter the political status of immigrants and residents in Puerto Rico and Washington DC. Federal lawmakers tried unsuccessfully throughout the 1970s to pass postcard or same day registration. During the 1980s, activists linked invigorating American democracy with combating Reaganism and averting the rightward reorientation of the Democratic Party. Organizers — including from Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns — endeavored to shift the class and race skew of the U.S. electorate through registration drives in poor and communities of color. Others campaigned to enact “Motor Voter” legislation requiring state agencies to offer people applying for a driver’s license or social services the opportunity to register to vote. Every one of these efforts encountered bitter resistance from within the Republican and Democratic Parties.

These struggles reveal the persistence of a strain in U.S. democratic culture that takes voting to be a privilege, not a right. This logic, deeply entwined with liberalism, insists that the right to legitimate voice within the polity should be earned and must be revoked under certain conditions. While people could no longer be disenfranchised on the basis of ascriptive characteristics—such as race or gender— they could forfeit full citizenship through choices, such as breaking the law, failing to register, or lacking identification. Broad popular support for ‘conditional citizenship’ facilitated racial and class subordination, legitimized voter suppression, and obscured the ambivalence within both major political parties toward multi-racial majoritarian democracy.

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