Wyoming: A brief history of the first state where women could vote
EDITOR'S NOTE: This page is part of a comprehensive guide to voting rights across the U.S. and in Puerto Rico.
In the Wild West, progressive politics made major waves in the years following the Civil War. Just look at Wyoming, where women gained the right to vote all the way back in 1869, a full 20 years before the territory became the country’s 44th state in 1890, and more than 50 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment.—
Up to 1,000 women were eligible to vote in Wyoming in the election of 1870, and many came out to the polls.
“Wyoming is the first place on God’s green earth which could consistently claim to be the land of the Free,” cheered Susan B. Anthony.
Women's suffrage had some major defenders in the era — the territorial governor vetoed a measure by the Democrats in the Legislature to undo the suffrage provision in 1870. And the state famously refused to rescind the right to vote for women when the federal government conditioned statehood on such a measure in 1889.
Liberty and voting rights were literally baked into the Constitution and tradition of the state. But so was nativism and xenophobia. At the same time as Wyoming's framers opted to keep women's suffrage on the books, they instituted a literacy qualification that appeared designed to make it difficult for immigrants to play a role in the political process.
This meant that former enslaved people who moved West to Wyoming after the Civil War could also be disenfranchised. It is, however, unknown if the constitutional provision was ever used at the polls, said Jennifer Helton, assistant professor of history at Ohlone College.
For decades after Wyoming held its first election that saw women vote, federal law held that any Indigenous person looking to cast a ballot needed to renounce their tribal citizenship and apply for an U.S. one, despite being born on U.S. soil. Native Americans as a whole weren't granted citizenship rights until 1924, and Asian immigrants were barred from voting throughout much of Wyoming's early history.
But over the past 130 years, the state has continued to, ever so slowly, extend voting rights to disenfranchised members of the body politic.
Poll taxes, in effect since Wyoming became a territory, remained a fixture in state election law until 1969. And Wyoming is one of just eight states, most in the South, that never ratified the 24th Amendment that ended poll taxes across the country. In 2017, the state restored voting rights for felons who maintained clean public records for five years after completing sentences for first-time, nonviolent offenses.
These days, Wyoming is controlled by a Republican supermajority in both houses of the Legislature. Its U.S. senators, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, are both Republicans. So is the state’s lone member of the House, Rep. Liz Cheney.
After the 2020 election, Republicans in Wyoming took action on election security, pushing through a voter ID law that requires voters at the polls to show accepted forms of identification before they can cast their ballots. The state is accepting a wide variety of ID options, from tribal ID cards to valid passports and public school student Identifications.
But because of Wyoming’s racial homogeneity — white, non-Hispanic people make up more than 83% of the state’s population — some political experts have asserted that new voting restrictions are less likely to occur there.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that in 2021, Republican-dominated states with high degrees of racial diversity like South Carolina and Mississippi enacted more than double the amount of voting rights restrictions seen in states like Wyoming and Montana.
Gregory Svirnovskiy is a Pulliam Fellow at The Arizona Republic. You can follow him on Twitter @gsvirnovskiy or reach him by email at gregory.svirnovskiy@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Wyoming: A brief history of voting rights
