Republicans say that voter restrictions are necessary to safeguard against purportedly widespread fraud. (In-person voter fraud is actually vanishingly rare.) But in adopting these voter-fraud arguments, Republicans are participating in a long-standing tradition. Critics of an expansive franchise have warned of widespread voter fraud since the adoption of the Constitution. Yet these charges have never been supported by systematic evidence. Instead, they have served as a false pretext, not a legitimate justification, for restrictions on the ballot throughout American history.
In the 19th century, those who wanted to restrict the vote only to white men claimed, without evidence, that racial and gender exclusion guarded against voter fraud by preventing unscrupulous politicians from buying the votes of allegedly dependent women and ignorant blacks.
New Jersey, for example, was the only state in the beginning years of the republic to authorize voting by both African Americans and women. In the early 19th century, when New Jersey followed most other states in restricting voting to white men, an opinion writer in the Trenton Federalist praised the legislature for ending “what has made our elections disagreeable, contentious, and corrupt; all Females and Negroes being now deprived of a vote, who, not being eligible to nor much acquainted with the affairs of government, need not any longer be made use of to answer a party purpose.”
During the first half of the 19th century, states expanded voting opportunities for white men by dropping economic qualifications, while extinguishing suffrage for African Africans. By the eve of the Civil War, standards for voting based on intrinsic qualities such as sex or race had largely supplanted standards based on property ownership. In 1800, only five of 16 states mandated white-only voting. By 1860, however, 28 of 33 states had adopted racially restrictive suffrage.
Suffrage for African American men expanded briefly during Reconstruction with the adoption of the Civil Rights Acts and the 15th Amendment, which forbade states from denying the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, the white supremacists who “redeemed” the South after Reconstruction found means to disenfranchise African Americans through such allegedly race-neutral devices as literacy tests and poll taxes.