Chapter One: We the People

The most important players in the election of a U.S. president are not the candidates or their staffs, not the political parties or the other organizations with a stake in the outcome, and not the media pundits who often try to tell us what we think. No, as hard as it is to remember sometimes, a presidential election revolves around the beliefs and the actions of American voters. Come Election Day, no one else’s opinions matter, and no one else has control over the outcome.

Voting is the great equalizer in American society. No matter how much money you have or who your friends are or whether or not you contributed to a particular candidate, you have one vote—the same as everybody else. And with that one vote, you have the power to influence decisions that will affect your life. Your job, your taxes, your health care, your Social Security, whether the nation goes to war, you name it—they are all at stake.

Opening Democracy's Door: Expanding the Franchise

The U.S. Constitution left it to the states to determine precisely who was qualified to vote. As a result, expanding voting rights to Americans who had been turned away or discouraged from voting has required either: (1) a constitutional amendment to make it the law of the land that certain groups cannot be denied the right to vote; or (2) changes in federal law to remove barriers to registration and voting and to make it easier for all Americans to have their say. To this day, the states still set the basic qualifications for voting, but they may not turn away certain categories of people, thanks to a series of constitutional amendments:

• The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, ensured that Americans could not be denied the right to vote on account of their race. The amendment was one of three that were ratified in the Reconstruction era following the Civil War in an effort to guarantee equal rights for African-Americans. The other Reconstruction amendments were the Thirteenth, which outlawed slavery, and the Fourteenth, which guaranteed equal protection under the law for all citizens, regardless of their race.

• The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, marked the end of a decades-long struggle for equal voting rights for women. By 1916, women were able to vote in only twelve states; the vast majority of American women were still denied this fundamental right. In the end, the fight for women’s voting rights was led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the precursor of today’s League of Women Voters.

• The Twenty-sixth Amendment is the most recent constitutional amendment relating to the right to vote. Ratified in 1971, it extended the vote to anyone eighteen years of age and over. Until then, states had generally restricted voting to the twenty-one-and-over population.

• Other constitutional amendments have expanded the electorate in different ways—with the Twenty-third (ratified in 1961) allowing residents of the District of Columbia to vote for president, and the Twenty-fourth (1964) outlawing the poll taxes that discouraged poor people, mostly African-Americans, from voting in many Southern states. It is hard to believe today, but poll taxes meant that people actually had to pay to vote.

The Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act is a complex and detailed law, but its basic goal is to make sure that racial minorities, no matter where they live, have the same opportunity as other citizens to participate in the nation’s political life. The law was enacted to try to stop some of the common practices that restricted African-American voting in many Southern states.

Passage of the Voting Rights Act happened shortly after civil rights activists organized a protest march in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, with the goal of drawing national attention to the struggle for black voting rights. Violence erupted as police brutally attacked the marchers on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Another march was organized two weeks later and culminated in an address by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., that drew twenty thousand people to the state capital of Montgomery. The episode created new support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law that August.

The following are some of the law’s key provisions:

• No citizen can be prevented from voting in presidential elections because of length-of-residency requirements.

• No one can deny an eligible citizen the right to vote or interfere with or intimidate anyone seeking to register to vote.

• Literacy tests and other methods cannot be used as qualifications for voting in any federal, state, local, general, or primary election.

• Seven states and a number of local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of discrimination based on race must submit any changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval.

In 1975, Congress added provisions to the act to make sure that U.S. citizens are not deprived of the right to vote because they cannot read, write, or speak English. Another series of amendments in 1982 provided that Americans with disabilities cannot be prohibited from bringing someone else to the polls to help them vote, so long as that person is not the voter’s employer or union representative. In 2006, Congress passed a twenty-five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act with all its provisions.

Chapter One: We the People

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