In a democracy, or republic, like the United States, few rights are more important than the right to vote. Although representatives undoubtedly try to listen to all of their constituents, they are especially likely to respond to those who vote. In addition, voting for candidates who share their priorities and goals is the most direct way for citizens to influence public policy. Voting is also a means for citizens to hold elected officials accountable—officials who do not carry out the will of the people can be voted out of office on Election Day.

Expanding Suffrage

Voting in the United States was originally very limited: at the time of the nation's founding, only white, male property owners were allowed to vote. Women, men who could not afford to own property, and nonwhite people had no direct say in government.

During the Jacksonian Era, Americans began to adopt increasingly liberal views of voting rights. As many states revised their constitutions during this period, most of them eliminated property requirements for voting, although they continued to limit the vote to white males.

The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the U.S. Constitution nationalized voting requirements and sought to expand suffrage to nonwhite men. In theory, this meant that no man could be denied the right to vote based on his race.

In practice, however, many states imposed voting requirements that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote. These included literacy tests, grandfather clauses (no required literacy test if one's grandfather had voted), poll taxes (taxes paid as a condition to voting), and all-white primaries.

Such regulations were frequently waived for whites, which meant African Americans who could not read, whose grandfathers had not voted, and who could not afford the poll tax would not be allowed to vote. In addition, African Americans who sought to vote or register to vote were often terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan.

Even after African American men were (in theory) granted the right to vote, women were still excluded from the franchise. Those in the woman suffrage movement, who had been allies of the abolition movement, hoped that women would be granted the right to vote when African Americans were. But this did not come to pass.

Instead, the woman suffrage movement would work for another 50 years to secure women's voting rights. With the help of the progressive movement, and after women played a significant role in the war effort on the home front during World War I, women were finally granted the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment (1920).

The Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act

During World War II, African American men served in segregated military units while African American women made contributions to the war effort at home, and the postwar period saw a push to guarantee African Americans' civil rights. In 1948, President Harry Truman desegregated the U.S. armed forces with executive order 9981. In 1954, the Supreme Court overturned the separate but equal doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education.

In a landmark voting rights case, the Supreme Court in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) invalidated an oddly-shaped, or gerrymandered, district that was designed to keep African Americans from voting in Tuskegee, Alabama. The ruling helped increase attention paid to the voting rights of African Americans. In 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment eliminated the poll tax as a condition for voting. A number of other civil rights laws also addressed voting issues, eliminating literacy tests where they had been applied in a discriminatory fashion and sending in federal registrars to enroll voters.

In 1964, the Mississippi Summer Project, also known as "Freedom Summer," sent hundreds of black and white student volunteers to the Deep South to run African American voter registration drives, establish Freedom Schools, and get the black community involved in politics.

The following year, the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march led to passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government the power to enforce voting rights, particularly in states that had a history of suppressing the African American vote. This allowed more African Americans than ever to exercise their right to vote.

The Twenty-sixth Amendment

The 1960s also saw increasing pressure to lower the voting age to 18. At the time, the voting age was dictated by the states, and most states set this limit at 21. Meanwhile, the military draft, which was being used to supply soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War, applied to all men aged 18 or older. This meant that many individuals called to fight and potentially die in the war were not old enough to vote and therefore had no say in electing the government officials who were conducting the war. The movement to lower the voting age culminated with the adoption of the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971.

Voting Controversies Today

The decades since the passage of the Twenty-sixth Amendment has seen continued debate over voting rights. Some have argued that the voting age should be lowered further to increase voter turnout and political participation. Debate also surrounds the issue of convicted felons' voting rights. Felons are often stripped of their voting rights once convicted of a crime, and whether or not those rights can be restored once a felon has served their time varies from state to state.

State voter ID laws, which require voters to show state-approved identification in order to vote, have been particularly controversial. Proponents of voter ID laws argue that they are necessary to prevent voting fraud. Opponents of voter ID laws, on the other hand, argue that they place an undue burden on racial minorities and the poor, who often cannot afford the necessary documentation, and that evidence showing that voter fraud is rare proves such laws are unnecessary.