Voting Rights
| Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
| Pages | 793-801 |
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The American governmental system is a representative democracy with a key fundamental element—the right or privilege to vote. The system operates by peaceable argument. People take sides, debate (argue their views), and vote to reach a decision. Just because a decision is reached does not suggest the arguments are over. The decision only means voters will abide by the decision of the majority for a specific amount of time until the next vote is taken. Consequently, in the United States, government by the people never means full consent (everyone agreeing on one way). At any given time many citizens may be opposed to who is in power or may be against what the government is doing.
But even the smallest minorities, by participating actively, may influence a democracy. A democracy undergoes constant change in responding to the needs and concerns of its people. Voting provides the means to change.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century most Americans think of the right to vote as one of the most basic rights of U.S. citizenship. However,
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citizenship and voting have not always been directly related. From the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 until 1971, large numbers of American citizens could not vote.
The Framers of the Constitution feared giving too much political power to the people would encourage mob rule. In 1776 John Adams, a respected advocate for American liberty who would become America's second president, warned that granting the vote to everyone would bring political disaster. In 1787 Alexander Hamilton told the constitutional convention that "the people seldom judge or determine right." The Framers believed voting should be limited to white landowning men. Owning property, they believed, gave men a stake in society and made them more responsible citizens.
As originally adopted, the U.S. Constitution allowed those eligible to vote to only elect members of the House of Representatives. To check the power of the people, the President and senators were elected by state legislators. The Framers also left to the states the power to decide which of their citizens should have the right to vote. As they hoped, most states enacted laws requiring some kind of property or wealth—usually a certain amount of land—before allowing men to vote. The common man who owned no property or lacked a fixed amount of wealth could not vote at all. Congress did reserve for itself in Article I of the Constitution the power to control the time and place of elections.
The property requirements became increasingly unpopular. Beginning in Ohio in 1802, state after state passed laws giving the vote to all white men whether they owned property or not. By the late 1820s only Virginia still had the property requirement. Male citizens also won the right to vote in presidential elections and to choose senators by direct vote when the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913.
Yet, most adult citizens still could not vote simply because they were female, black, or young. The struggle for the right to vote would continue as a peoples' fight, battling step by step, to turn America into a nation truly "of the people."
The extraordinary letter by Abigail Adams illustrated that even before the Constitution was penned a few women were not content to be voiceless in the new nation. But the thought of women voting seemed ridiculous to many men and women. Most women accepted the idea of leaving
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decisions of government, like those of the family, to males. Yet, in July of 1848 five women in the village of Seneca Falls, New York called a meeting that started a fight to secure the woman's right to vote. Lead by Elizabeth Stanton, the group presented a resolution declaring, "we insist that [women] have immediate admission to all rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States . . . it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the right of elective franchise [the right to vote]." Suffrage (right to vote) associations concerned with women's rights began to appear around the nation. Victories were small at first but on December 10, 1869 the women of Wyoming became the first to win an unlimited right to vote.
The Supreme Court did not help the suffrage cause. In 1875, in Minor v. Happersett, the Court ruled that granting voting...
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