Connecticut History

THE HISTORY OF IMMIGRANT VOTING RIGHTS

IN CONNECTICUT

The Immigrant Voting Project and
New York University Law Students for Human Rights

Resident Noncitizen Voting in Connecticut:
A History

In colonial Connecticut, property ownership and gender, not citizenship, were the primary criteria for suffrage. Any male 21 years or older could become a freeman, eligible to vote in state elections, if he owned real estate with an assessed yearly rental value of 40 shillings ($7.00) or owned personal property assessed at 40 pounds ($134). Since all personal property except cattle was exempt from taxation, a man wanting to vote must have owned land as a practical matter.[1]

Citizenship did not become an explicit constitutional requirement for suffrage in Connecticut until the post-Revolution Constitution of 1818.[2] Leading up to the constitutional convention of 1818, fear of immigrant voters was voiced in the public debates. Historian Wesley Horton notes that the Federalist Noah Webster suggested that more votes be given to ministers and those with greater taxable wealth, in order to ensure that newer immigrants would have comparatively less influence.[3] Although, in the end, the Constitution of 1818 generally expanded suffrage by reducing the property requirement and granting voting rights to non-property owners who had served in the state militia, it also constitutionalized the disenfranchisement of blacks and women and explicitly disenfranchised non-citizens for the first time.[4]

Later amendments to the 1818 Constitution operated to further disenfranchise newer immigrant groups, regardless of their members’ citizenship status. In 1855, the Constitution was amended to require that a person be able to read the constitution before becoming an elector.[5] In 1897, a further amendment demanded that a person be able to read the Constitution in English prior to voting.[6] According to Jacob Katz Cogan, the 1855 amendment was purposefully written “to disenfranchise a growing immigrant population in the 1850s.”[7]

Although today’s Constitution, first adopted in 1965, no longer contains a reading requirement, judicial commentators have noted that no “court, however, has seen fit to protect participation of aliens in democratic political institutions, particularly those involving a state’s constitutional prerogatives.”[8] United States citizenship remains a prerequisite to voting in Connecticut in the current version of the constitution, which provides that:

Every citizen of the United States who has attained the age of eighteen years, who is a bona fide resident of the town in which he seeks to be admitted as an elector and who takes such oath, if any, as may be prescribed by law, shall be qualified to be an elector.[9]

In recent years, there has been at least one legislative attempt to revive limited non-citizen voting in Connecticut. On January 11, 2003, the Government Administration and Election Committee introduced Bill 340, “An Act Concerning Voting by Resident Alien Property Owners.” If passed, the bill would have expanded local suffrage to include certain non-citizen taxpayers, changing the language of Section 7-6 of the Connecticut General Statutes as follows:

At any town meeting other than a regular or special town election or at any meeting of any fire, sewer or school district or any other municipal subdivision of any town incorporated by any special act, any person who is an elector of such town may vote and any [citizen of the United States] person of the age of eighteen years or more who, jointly or severally, is liable to the town, district or subdivision for taxes assessed against [him]such person on an assessment of not less than one thousand dollars on the last-completed grand list of such town, district or subdivision, or who would be so liable if not entitled to an exemption under subdivision (17), (19), (22), (23), (25) or (26) of section 12-81, may vote, unless restricted by the provisions of any special act relating to such town, district or subdivision.

The bill died in committee without receiving much public attention or debate.

References

[1] Wesley W. Horton, Connecticut Constitutional History, 1776-1988(1988)

[2] Gerald Rosburg, Aliens and Equal Protection: Why Not the Right to Vote?, 75Mich. L. Rev. 1092, 1097 (1977).

[3] Horton, supra note 10.

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Jacob K. Cogan, The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America, 107 Yale L.J. 473, 495 (1997).

[8] State v. Thigpen, 397 A.2d 912, 913 (Conn. Super. Ct., 1978).

[9] Conn. Const. Art. VI, §1.

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