The Fight for the Immigrant Ballot
A Seattle contractor sues the City Clerk to challenge a restrictive 1893 registration law that threatened to disenfranchise foreign-born voters.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The new registration law is causing a great deal of annoyance and in many instances serious inconvenience to citizens of foreign birth, many of whom, it is feared, may be disenfranchised by being unable to comply with its provisions. Matt Brannagan, a well-known contractor of this city, says he does not intend to lose the casting of his vote at the coming election without making a strong legal fight to prove that the provision of the registration law requiring the production of naturalization papers is unconstitutional. He has retained attorneys to commence mandamus proceedings against City Clerk George Stoneman. Mr. Brannagan was born in Ireland and arrived in America in 1864. He took out his naturalization papers while in San Francisco, but later used them to take up a homestead; those papers were forwarded to Washington, D.C., and are now lost. When he attempted to register, the city clerk refused him, demanding the original certificates. The case is expected to reach the state supreme court, as it affects the rights of a large percentage of foreign-born local voters.
“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
This 1894 struggle over voter registration requirements highlights the perennial friction between bureaucratic demands and the right to participate in local democracy. Today, debates over voter ID laws and accessibility continue to echo the same tensions regarding who is permitted to exercise their political voice.
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