NEW YORK — Laws allowing private citizens to challenge another person’s right to vote have been used for more than a century to suppress Black voters and other voters of color, according to a Brennan Center for Justice report tracing the practice from the aftermath of Reconstruction to modern-day voter challenges. The Brennan Center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to reform democracy, end mass incarceration and protect liberty and security.
Written by Justin Lam, the article focuses on how laws that allow citizens to challenge one another’s eligibility have been used to suppress voters of color.
According to the Brennan Center, in 1872, just two years after the 15th Amendment was ratified, white residents of Wake County, North Carolina, alleged that 150 recently freed Black Americans were improperly registered to vote and should be removed from the voter rolls under the state’s new challenge law.
In 2012, a group called the Voter Integrity Project filed challenges against more than 500 Wake County voters, with most targeting people of color. According to the article, local election officials dismissed almost all the challenges because of a lack of evidence.
Still, legal protections have not deterred other groups from trying to exploit the state’s challenge procedures to disenfranchise voters of color.
“More than a decade later, ahead of the 2024 election, the leader of an 1,800-member ‘election integrity’ group instructed volunteers to identify voters with ‘Hispanic-sounding last names’ to be potentially challenged,” the article writes.
The first laws that permitted private citizens to contest the ballots or voter registrations of others were created to uphold requirements related to property, residency or documentation for voting. However, between 1867 and 1880 — just three years after the end of the Reconstruction era — at least 21 states enacted or expanded laws that enabled voters to challenge other voters’ eligibility, often targeting Black communities.
Today, the majority of states permit challenges to voter registration. However, contrary to the arguments of their supporters, these laws are not essential for ensuring accurate voter rolls; election officials have better data and systematic processes for keeping the rolls up to date.
These challenges serve as a mechanism for private individuals to dissuade others from voting. Even if a challenge fails to remove a voter from the rolls, that voter can still be intimidated or frustrated by the challenge and discouraged from participating in elections.
In the report’s section on “Backtracking on Reconstruction,” it states that after the Civil War, vigilante violence — such as lynchings and massacres — was an extralegal tool used to maintain white dominance. States also implemented legal measures to deter Black Americans from voting, including challenge laws.
In 1870, for instance, shortly after the end of Reconstruction in Virginia, the state legislature enacted a law that allowed voters to challenge individuals they believed were “known or suspected not to be duly qualified voters.”
According to the article, “[n]ewspaper accounts reveal how white citizens regularly took advantage of challenge laws to contest Black voters’ rights. In 1893, for example, Democrats in Richmond challenged Black voters — even those they knew to be qualified — and delayed them at the polls.”
In 1877, Democrats in the North Carolina legislature expanded a challenge law, requiring a voter to “‘prove his identity, or age, and residence, by the testimony of at least one elector, under oath’” upon a registrar’s or any voter’s challenge.
Many Black voters lacked a birth certificate, physician or midwife to prove their age, and many gave their place of residence by colloquial names, such as “‘Coon’s Holly’” or “‘Across the Railroad Tracks.’” Registrars took these as failures to provide complete mailing addresses.
The article writes that these requirements provided easy pretexts for challenges. Any citizen could inspect the registration book and contest a name on Election Day or the preceding Saturday or Monday.
This allowed for mass challenges, overwhelming election judges in areas with many Black voters.
Even if a challenged voter proved his identity and continued residence in the precinct and found another voter to give sworn supporting testimony, an election judge could disqualify the voter if he thought the evidence was insufficient or believed that the voter was ineligible.
North Carolina’s legislature also passed laws to curb voting in areas with large Black populations. The article writes that resentment of Black political power continued to be intertwined with challenge laws.
Challenge laws extended beyond the South. For instance, in 1878, Minnesota revised its challenge law to mandate that any voter facing a challenge at the polls must submit an affidavit and provide a witness to verify their residency in the electoral district.
The law applied only to Minneapolis and St. Paul — centers of the state’s Black population.
“When laws were struck down on discriminatory grounds, new laws often sprung up in their place. After the Ohio Supreme Court overturned an explicitly racist challenge law, the state legislature enacted a new one that was race-neutral in its language but still enabled challengers to target Black voters,” the article states.
According to the article, challenge laws did not stand alone. They were part of a system of overt violence and intimidation and legal barriers, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and residency requirements, to prevent Black Americans from voting.
By the early 1900s, Black turnout rates across the South had fallen to the single digits.
Challenges remained a favored tool of white supremacists into the 20th century as the electorate diversified. Even though Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to end discriminatory voting policies, challengers have continued to target voters of color.
From the end of Reconstruction to the present, the use of challenges to disenfranchise voters of color has demonstrated that such practices do not genuinely contribute to the accuracy of voter rolls.
Instead, these initiatives often mask underlying, racially motivated agendas. According to the article, this historical context underscores the importance of entrusting the management of voter rolls to election professionals rather than private individuals.
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