Should the poor be allowed to vote?

Last year, Judson Phillips, president of Nashville-based Tea Party Nation, declared on a radio show that it "makes a lot of sense" to go back to a system in the U.S. where voting is restricted to citizens who own property -- a troubling prospect for the one-third of U.S. residents who rent their homes, and would presumably be denied the franchise.

Rush Limbaugh seems to agree with Vadum as well. In December 2010, commenting on a news report about people lining up for housing assistance, Limbaugh asked:

"If people can't even feed and clothe themselves should they be allowed to vote? Should they be voting?"

As Ari Berman points out in a recent Rolling Stone piece, this isn't the first time leading conservatives have called for taking the franchise from those at the lower end of the economic ladder -- and less likely to vote Republican.

As influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelicals in 1980:

I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

While not as shocking as outright calls to keep poor people from voting, Berman argues that Republicans have pushed a bevy of laws over the last year that could have the same result, including requirements for voters to show a photo ID at the polls, restrictions on voter registration drives and moves to limit early voting.

The aim of peeling off Democratic votes with a big election year coming up seems clear enough. But historian Alex Keyssar, author of the seminal book The Right to Vote, argues that attempts to limit voting may have as much to do with economics as politics.

In U.S. history, for example, elites have pushed to restrict voting among the lower classes during times of economic upheaval, in part to stave off the possibility of political revolt:

The most common source of contractions of the franchise [in U.S. history has been] class apprehension--particularly when coupled with racial or ethnic divisions. The most well-known instance, of course, was the disfranchisement of African Americans in the South at the end of the nineteenth century; this was prompted not only by racism but by the desire of many white Southerners to maintain a disciplined and powerless agricultural labor force. Similar impulses figured in the passage of literacy tests aimed at Irish immigrants in Massachusetts in the 1850s, or Italians and Jews in New York in the early 1920s.