Voting rights are so fundamental to our democracy that it is easy to take them for granted — but the assault on suffrage over the last few years has made it clear that complacency is no longer an option. It’s time to go on offense.
In the early United States, only white adult male property owners could vote, and even then only if they met stringent, often unjustified, requirements like paying a poll tax or passing a literacy test. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870 and stipulating that men cannot be denied the right to vote on the basis of race) and the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920, guaranteeing women the right to vote in every state) changed this.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) outlawed literacy tests and other barriers, while Section 4(b) of the VRA identified localities with a history of racial discrimination and required them to submit any proposed voting rule changes for federal approval before they took effect. This requirement gave the government more power to stop states from introducing new barriers and to prevent those who had been subject to past discrimination from falling back into the old patterns.
There are several ways to expand voter access and make elections more fair, including restoring voting rights to ex-felons who have finished their prison sentences, lowering the minimum age for voting to 18, and allowing people with disabilities to choose an in-person assistant for assistance at the polls. Read more about the specifics of each of these proposals and what’s needed to ensure that all Americans can exercise their right to vote.