“The Immigrant Vote”: Noncitizen Voting Rights in the Midwest

Sara Egge, Centre College

In the United States, voting is not a right of citizenship. Until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women citizens could not vote. Many states banned citizens who committed felonies from voting after the Civil War, a period in which states also disenfranchised Black citizens. In each case, the people targeted had birthright citizenship, a status outlined in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment. But until about 1920, noncitizens could vote in about half of all states. They could vote after filing a Declaration of Intention, or first papers, in court after two years’ residency, creating a policy known as declarant or alien suffrage. Lax enforcement and little federal oversight until the early-twentieth century made the naturalization process haphazard and created large numbers of perpetual declarant voters. Scholars have ignored the preponderance and nature of noncitizen voting. People with first papers often delayed or never finished the five-year-long naturalization process, making noncitizen voting prevalent and, in some places, a major factor in electoral outcomes. In the upper Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, noncitizen voting was central to partisan politics, so much so that the “immigrant vote” was a desirable and fought-over element. During moments of political turmoil, especially when Populism fractured Republican dominance in the region, politicians bowed to noncitizen voters on essential issues like prohibition, woman suffrage, taxation, and government regulation of industry. In this trio of midwestern states emerged a “turning point” in migration history, one that directly challenged theoretical constructions and legal expressions of citizenship. While increasing nativism, elevated after 1914 by World War I, eliminated provisions for noncitizen voting, its decades-long history, one in which political parties eagerly courted declarant voters, reveals policy implications for present debates about “illegal” or “illegitimate” voters.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 157. Citizenship, Naturalization, and Democracy: Learning from the Late-19th and Early-20th Century United States