Thank You for Voting Young Readers' Edition: The Past, Present, and Future of Voting

Part One

The Stories of How We Got the Vote

Struggling for Voting Equality

The whole point of a democracy is supposed to be that citizens take an active role in deciding how the country or state or city should be run. They get to vote on it.

Democracies have been around for thousands of years—all the way back to the fifth century BCE, and forms of it even before that! And controversy has always swirled around who can vote.

THE FIRST DEMOCRACY

The first widely known democracy was in Athens, Greece, and all adult citizens were required to participate in governing. The catch: only free men were considered citizens. Women, children, and slaves were not, so they couldn’t vote.

In the United States today, with certain exceptions, any citizen who is at least eighteen years old has the right to vote, no matter what race or religion they are, no matter their level of education, no matter how much or little money they have.

But for a very long time, that wasn’t the case. Unfair as it was, voting was largely limited to white men who owned land.

In the late 1770s and 1780s, when America was figuring out how it would operate as a new nation separate from England, each state made its own voting rules. This was how it had worked with the colonies before they became states. America continued to mostly copy the way people had voted in England, and that meant voting was a privilege for wealthy, mostly white male landowners.

FOUNDER JOHN ADAMS ON WHO SHOULD VOTE

In 1776, John Adams wrote that if men who had no property were allowed a voting voice, New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level.

This quote is cleaned up a little bit for modern punctuation, but to me what Adams is really saying is: we must keep the voting power for ourselves, or people will see they, too, are entitled to it in a true democracy. Everyone would be equal! The nightmare!

But many new Americans took democracy seriously, and eventually, laws were proposed to make voting more fair. Different laws affected different groups, so one way to examine the history of voting in the United States is to look at how groups of people—African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants (those who come to live in the United States from another country), eighteen-year-olds, and women—were victorious in getting the right to vote.

VICTORIES IN VOTING:

More Recent Than You Think

The dates of those voting rights victories—court decisions or new laws that granted certain people the right to vote—can sound like ancient history. But groundbreaking voting laws have benefited the parents and grandparents of today’s Americans. My great-grandmother Hazel was born in 1900, and would have been among the first women able to vote nationwide as soon as she turned twenty-one. Many immigrants of Asian descent born that same year wouldn’t be eligible for U.S. citizenship until the year they turned fifty-two. An African American born at the turn of the twentieth century and living in the South may not have cast a ballot on Election Day until she was sixty-five years old.

THE VERY FIRST VOTE FOR PRESIDENT

Before 1787, the country was governed by a document called the Articles of Confederation, which left most of the power to the states and didn’t create a position for a powerful president. Once America won the Revolutionary War and declared independence from England, the need for a national, or federal, government became pressing. Then came a time of great debate—the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which took place in Philadelphia over five months. It gave us the U.S. Constitution, the document that still governs us today.

The new Constitution provided for a president, and the first vote took place in 1789. The outcome couldn’t have been more predictable—General George Washington, a hero of the Revolutionary War, won.

Actually, it was electors from the states who elected Washington. Just as in today’s presidential elections, the president was officially selected by the Electoral College. (More about this mysterious Electoral College in Part Two.)

Today, a popular vote is held in each state and voters vote for who they would like to win. They essentially tell the electors who to vote for. In the 1789 election, however, states chose the electors and had different ways of doing it—some states did let citizens vote for them, but some were appointed by the state legislatures.

In that particular election, George Washington received all the electoral votes; he’s the only president who’s ever been elected unanimously. (It was a lot easier to do that when it was only a few electors voting and not the whole country weighing in.)

Just as presidential elections went from being a fairly predictable event to the years-long campaigns we see now, who could vote in those elections has also changed a lot.

Adams’s prediction that citizens would eventually demand one of the most important rights of citizenship—voting—was correct. Americans learned to use their voices to argue for their rights, and use the words in the Constitution to argue that equal should mean equal for everyone.

As the nation grew, women, African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants were among the groups that would have to overcome discrimination, skeptical politicians, physical attacks, and court battles to secure their right to vote.

African Americans and the Vote

African Americans have been treated poorly throughout America’s voting history. Politicians at every level of government repeatedly and purposefully discriminated against African Americans. Denying them the right to vote has been a focus of that prejudice. If you don’t get to vote, it’s difficult to change the unfair laws holding you back.

Many African Americans were enslaved until 1865, when the Civil War between the Northern and Southern states ended. At the end of that year, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which said neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist, was adopted by the states.

Even though slavery was abolished, the right of African Americans to vote would continue to be a topic of controversy and legal disputes for years to come. That is true even though free African American men had sometimes been allowed to vote even before the Civil War. Even when John Adams was making his proclamations about voting, in 1776, there were exceptions to the rule that only white men could vote.

SOMETIMES BLACK MEN HAD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. AND SOMETIMES IT WAS TAKEN AWAY.

Every state—even today—has its own constitution. The laws in those constitutions can’t go against anything in the U.S. Constitution, but they can add details or new requirements. In New Jersey, for about thirty years starting in 1776, property-owning women and free black men could vote. That ended in 1807, when the state legislature limited voting to white, property-owning men. In 1777, Vermont’s constitution abolished slavery for men over twenty-one and gave those males the right to vote. Pennsylvania is another state that did allow free black men to vote, but changed their laws in 1838 to allow only whites to vote.

FIGHTING BACK: ROBERT PURVIS

Robert Purvis was born in 1810 to a free black woman and a white cotton merchant. When Purvis’s father died in 1826, he left him a lot of money. Purvis became an antislavery activist, and was the first African American member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. When Pennsylvania was considering taking away free African American men’s right to vote in 1838, Purvis made a reasoned and heartfelt argument in a document called Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement. (Disfranchisement meaning taking away a person’s right to vote.) He pointed out free black men had been voting in Pennsylvania for a half century, and how important the right to vote was to citizens. When you take away an individual’s right to vote, he said, you have given the government full power over him, and have made the government a little worse for everyone else, too.

When the Civil War began in 1861, only a handful of states allowed black men to vote equal to whites under their own state laws. But black men fought in the Civil War in great numbers—around 180,000 in the Union Army—and began pushing for equality in all states, including voting rights, as the war came to an end.

In 1865, for instance, a group of fifty-nine African Americans from Tennessee presented a petition to a pro-Union convention in Nashville, asking for the right to vote and referring to those still fighting in the war. That same year, black citizens of New Orleans organized a mock (pretend) election to show how seriously they took the right to vote.

THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION

Increased pressure to allow African Americans to vote eventually led to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and agreed to by the states in 1868, granted citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, and guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the laws. It also aimed to force Southern states to allow black men to vote by threatening to reduce their number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives if they didn’t. Essentially, if they didn’t allow black men to vote, these states would have less of a say in national politics.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION?

A change to the Constitution is called an amendment, and it usually means something is added to recognize a right. Amendments are rare and difficult to get done. The Constitution provides a few ways to do it, but most amendments to the Constitution have been passed this way:

Both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House must approve the language of the amendment; in order to pass, two-thirds of the Senate and the same percentage of the U.S. House must approve.

After the two houses of Congress approve, the amendment goes to the states to decide.

Three-fourths of states, via their state legislatures, must approve the amendment.

If enough states approve, the amendment is ratified and made part of the Constitution.

Additional laws called the Reconstruction Acts—part of the effort to put the country back together after the Civil War—had even stronger language, saying that in order for Southern states to be let back into the United States, they had to approve the Fourteenth Amendment and write new state constitutions that allowed black males the right to vote. By July 1868, seven states had been readmitted. Historian and Harvard professor Alexander Keyssar wrote: Black enthusiasm for political participation was so great the freedmen often put down their tools and [stopped] working when elections or conventions were being held.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS DURING THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA (1865–1877)

During Reconstruction, an estimated 2,000 black men held elective office.

1868 One house (the lower house of the General Assembly) in South Carolina’s state legislature was majority black.

1870 Hiram Revels took his oath of office as a U.S. senator for Mississippi, the first African American to hold an office in the U.S. Congress.

1870 Joseph Rainey of South Carolina became the first African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

NEED FOR THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT

Even as Reconstruction was helping African Americans gain political rights and hold offices, many people were fighting to stop the progress. African Americans faced violence in the South, and support for their rights in the North was uneven.

People who wanted African Americans to have voting rights said the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t enough, and that there needed to be another amendment specifically about voting.

So, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was approved by the states. It said that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The precise wording of the Fifteenth Amendment was heavily debated, and in the end didn’t protect voting rights as some lawmakers wanted. Some had suggested wording that would have outlawed the exact types of discrimination that would end up keeping many African