RIGHT TO VOTE
Mentioned in the Fourteenth
Amendment, Fifteenth,
Nineteenth,
Twenty-Fourth
and Twenty-sixth
Amendments, the right to vote (suffrage) is freedom of an individual to
actively participate in the political decision-making process by choosing
between competing people or ideas without fear or reprisal. The right to vote
can only be restricted if the government shows a compelling reason for doing
so. The Supreme Court will strictly scrutinize the government's justification
for limiting this right and probably strike down such a law.
The right to vote has been viewed as a
right, as a privilege, or as a duty. As a right, it is conceived of as an
inalienable attribute inherent in the individual. As a privilege, right to vote
is considered as being conferred on the individual by law and is subject to
limitations imposed by governing authorities. Some theories rely on the
classical Greek concept of the exercise of the right to vote as the citizen's
duty to participate actively in the welfare of the community.
Today universal or near-universal
suffrage prevails in most of the world, although the extent to which true choice
may be exerted varies widely. The requirements of voting show great uniformity
in different regions and under different systems of government. The right to
vote is almost invariably limited to citizens of a minimum age between 18 and
25, depending on the country, and to residents of the locality. Excluded are
the mentally ill and convicted felons. In some nations women's right to vote is
still subject to qualifications. In other parts of the world property ownership
and racial requirements for voting may be enforced. These qualifications for
right to vote, and others based on religion, education, and taxpaying, were
universal during the Middle Ages, and many persisted well into the 20th
century. Most exclusions reflected the fears of those with power that extending
the vote to individuals who had no stake in the existing order (the young, the
poor, and the itinerant) would lead to instability.
In the United States at the time the
Constitution was written, it is estimated that only 6 percent of the adult male
population were entitled to vote. Subsequent democratic changes in American
society eliminated religious and property qualifications. Racial barriers to
voting existed legally until the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was
ratified after the Civil War. Thereafter, blacks were excluded from the right
to vote in some states through such devices as the white primary, the poll tax,
literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. These were gradually interpreted to be
unconstitutional under the 15th Amendment or under the Equal Protection of the
Laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Women were given the franchise in 1920
under the Nineteen Amendment, and the right to vote was extended to
18-year-olds in 1971 under the Twenty-sixth Amendment.
One would think that with the
abolition of property requirements and poll taxes, the enfranchisement of
people of color, women, and 18-year-olds, the battle for the right to vote had
been won. But as it has been noted so often, democracy is a constantly evolving
process, and how we define individual rights within a democracy also changes
over time. There is a big difference in how an American citizen voted in the
1820s and how that ballot is cast at the beginning of the 21st century.
Moreover, it is not a simple case of pro-democratic heroes wanting to expand
the franchise while anti-democratic demons want to narrow it.
Throughout American history people of
the so-called better sort have feared mob rule; it is a theme that runs
throughout the writings of the Founding generation. In different form today we
find a version of it among those who would "purify" the electoral
process. Efforts to making voting registration easier, for example, are often
attacked as inviting corruption into the process. The relaxation of literacy
standards and the expansion of voting rights to citizens who do not speak or
read English is hailed by some as a victory of democracy and attacked by others
who fear that people with little knowledge of the issues can be manipulated by
demagogues.
Yet the curious fact remains that for
all that we have expanded the franchise, the percentage of Americans who vote
in presidential and other elections is one of the lowest among industrialized
nations. In the 2000 presidential campaign, for example, less than 50 percent
of the eligible voters cast their ballots. Scholars differ on why this decline
in voting has occurred from the high point of the late 19th century, when
voting rates regularly ran at 85 percent or better of qualified voters. Some
historians attribute the decline to the corresponding decline in the importance
of political parties in the daily lives of the people. Others think that the
growth of well-moneyed interest groups has led people to lose interest in
elections fought primarily through television and newspaper advertisements.
When non-voters are queried as to why they did not vote the answers range
widely. There are those who did not think that their single vote would make a
difference, and those who did not believe that the issues affected them, as
well as those who just did not care — a sad commentary in light of the long
historical movement toward universal suffrage in the United States.
Technical and procedural questions
remain. In the 2000 presidential election, election officials in the state of
Florida discarded up to 50,000 ballots, primarily because the ballot cards had
been improperly punched so that it was unclear for whom the voter had cast his
or her ballot. At that point, because of the archaic system known as the
Electoral College, the entire election hinged on less than a few hundred votes
cast in that state. Both Democrats and Republicans immediately went into court
to challenge the procedures, and in the end the Supreme Court of the United
States in essence awarded Florida — and the election — to George W. Bush.
In this case — and not for the first time — the Electoral College produced a president who had a minority of the popular vote. Americans are well aware of the Electoral College structure. It is not one of the most effective or rational aspects of American democracy, and is a relic of a time when the people were not trusted to elect a president directly. Electoral College is designed in such a way that each state is allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each State's population as determined in the Census). The political parties (or independent candidates) in each State submit to the State's chief election official a list of individuals pledged to their candidate for president and equal in number to the State's electoral vote. Usually, the major political parties select these individuals either in their State party conventions or through appointment by their State party leaders while third parties and independent candidates merely designate theirs. Whichever presidential ticket gets the most popular votes in a State wins all the Electors of that State. The two exceptions to this are Maine and Nebraska where two Electors are chosen by statewide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote within each Congressional district. The argument most frequently used to defend this deeply flawed system of electing the president is that it is valuable in terms of ensuring the status of the smaller states within the federal system.
The ballot-tallying problems
associated with the 2000 election obscured some very important issues. Both
sides wanted a fair counting of the vote; they wanted each ballot that had been
legitimately cast and properly marked to count, but differed on the technical
criteria by which to determine these matters. Despite cries in the media that
the state discriminated against minorities in how it handled the matter, the
fact is that a majority of the votes that were eventually disallowed had been
cast by middle-class elderly white voters, most of whom had been confused as to
how they were supposed to mark the ballots. No one, then or now, has suggested
that this was a ruse to invalidate tens of thousands of votes; no one up until
the counting actually began realized that the system was far less than perfect,
and in the next session of its legislature, Florida instituted reforms to
ensure that such a debacle would not happen again.
Such an election, with the person
getting the most popular vote not winning, is rare in the United States, and it
is one sign of the faith people have in the normal workings of the U.S.
election process that they easily accepted George Bush as the winner. There were
no riots in the streets, no barricades established. The Democratic candidate,
Al Gore, accepted the Supreme Court's decision on how the ballots should be
counted.
But many people were reminded by the
closeness of the 2000 presidential election that the individual's vote does
count. A shift of fractions of a percentage point in half-a-dozen states could
easily have swung the election the other way. Perhaps as a result, Americans in
the future will not take this important right, a right that lies at the very
heart of the notion of "consent of the governed," quite as much for
granted.
Learn more about right to vote
by visiting the following Web sites:
Modern History Sourcebook: SB
Anthony: Women's Right to Vote
History of the Right to Vote in the US
National
Voting Rights Institute
American Civil
Liberties Union - Voting Rights