Column: Let’s celebrate our right to vote

The Republican Eagle
Published Friday, February 22, 2008

By Minnesota Representative Sandy Wollschlager

The week of President’s Day finds us in a hurly-burly of political in fighting, private battles and public victories.

We can’t help ourselves from being interested in the presidential race. Less celebrated is the fact that the evolution of voting rights in the United States from the founding of the republic to the early 21st century - a story about race, gender, ethnicity and class - still hasn’t produced “a right to vote” in the Constitution of the United States. Please write to Congress about that!

Our founding fathers saw voting as a privilege. Individual states wrote their own laws, but most everywhere colonial precedents and traditional English patterns of thought shaped views and opinions. The act of voting was restricted to adult men who owned property.

There was a belief that in order to vote a person had to be independent. In 1893, Minnesota passed an extraordinary law preventing migrant lumberjacks and construction workers from gaining residence. Author Alexander Keyssar, “The Right to Vote, The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” notes that there was worry about “great interests” or “designing politicians” that could take advantage of a working man.

Keyssar points out after the Civil War, the 14th and 15th amendments were written in negative verse. The court cases spawned by these amendments were finally settled in Pope v. Williams in 1904, “the privilege to vote in a state is within the jurisdiction of the state itself.” In effect, the states could do as they wished, as long as they did not disfranchise men solely and overtly because of race and loyalty.

New brooms sweep clean and by the time I was able to vote, the dirty secret “not everyone believes in democracy” was mostly gone and an 18-year-old woman could vote anywhere in the U.S.

Keyssar keenly noted, “Success did not come to the suffrage movement until images and norms of gender roles began to shift under the gradual but sturdy press of changes in the social structure, until local experiences and evolving beliefs could relax some of the apprehensions about the potential consequences of enfranchisement.”

That lesson isn’t lost on me and today, as a member of the Governmental Operations, Reform, Technology and Elections Committee, I review and vote upon a wide variety of initiatives.

An example of a cutting edge initiative is instant runoff voting. IRV is a system of voting that allows voters to rank their preference for an office among multiple candidates. For local non-partisan elections, IRV is a general election with a built-in primary. A large city primary can cost roughly $200,000, so this is a real savings.

In November 2006, Minneapolis voters approved this method of voting for candidates for city offices beginning in 2009.

We can learn from the Minneapolis experience. Beliefs and benefits will evolve and apprehensions about something new will lessen among our countrymen and women. And so the democratic process continues to evolve as we seek to strengthen the privilege and right to vote.

Sandy Wollschlager, DFL-Cannon Falls, can be reached at (507) 263-0786 or rep.sandy.wollschlager@house.mn.

She is a co-author of instant runff voting legislation, HF 3006.