Voting is how people get a say in what happens in their city, state or country. But who gets a say has had to be decided by someone. Elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and to choose popes and Holy Roman emperors, but the elections of today began with representative government in Europe and North America from the 17th century on. Once governments were believed to get their power from the consent of the governed and to need that consent regularly, people had to decide who counted among the governed whose consent was needed.
In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 was one of three major 19th-century Reform Bills that made the electorate larger, and it came after a movement to end “rotten boroughs,” small districts controlled by one person or family. Even after universal suffrage, “one person, one vote” was not reached everywhere. In the United Kingdom, university graduates and owners of businesses in other districts could cast more than one ballot until 1948. Women's suffrage came later in some places: 1928 in Britain, 1944 in France, 1949 in Belgium and 1971 in Switzerland. In western Europe and North America adult male suffrage was ensured almost everywhere by 1920.
Voting rights in the United States have expanded, contracted, and expanded again as Americans dealt with shifting issues of politics, race, class, and wealth. Whether by constitutional amendment or by federal, state, or local legislation, expanding the electorate means changing laws. Owning property of a certain size or value was the earliest qualification for voters in the new United States. From the 1820s through the 1850s, states abolished property and tax requirements for casting ballots, and white workingmen gained a permanent influence on American elections. Many states began to define eligible voters as white males over the age of twenty-one. Nearly all white men could vote in the 1856 presidential election.
In 1776, Abigail Adams asked her husband John Adams to “remember the ladies” as he went to the Continental Congress. New Jersey women were the last to keep voting rights; they lost their ballots in 1807, when the state limited the vote to free, white, male citizens. In 1856 only six states allowed free African American men to vote, and no state extended voting rights to women. Women in Wyoming Territory were given the right to vote in all elections in 1869.
In July 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention in New York launched the women's rights movement and also called for woman suffrage. In 1869 the women's suffrage movement formed two groups over tactics: one sought a federal amendment for women's vote, and one worked on state constitutions. One of the two opposed the 15th Amendment because it left women out. They worked closely together and merged in 1890. In 1890 Wyoming became a state and the first whose constitution guaranteed women the right to vote.
An amendment to give women the vote was first introduced in Congress in 1878. President Woodrow Wilson came out in support of an amendment for women's suffrage in 1918. In January 1918 the amendment passed the House with the bare minimum two-thirds support but failed narrowly in the Senate. On May 21, 1919, the House passed the 19th Amendment, and two weeks later the Senate followed. It was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify it, on August 18, 1920, which gave it the agreement of three-fourths of the states. The amendment says the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied because of sex. But after 1920, many women still could not vote for decades because of discriminatory state voting laws.
African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” The 15th Amendment was passed by Congress on February 26, 1869, and ratified on February 3, 1870, and it says the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It gave African American men the right to vote.
African Americans voted and held office in many Southern states through the 1880s. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down Reconstruction-era attempts to enforce the 15th Amendment, which ended federal efforts to protect civil rights for decades. But in the early 1890s, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other devices to keep African Americans from voting were written into the laws of former Confederate states.
In 1937 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia poll tax in Breedlove v. Suttles, reasoning that states may decide who can vote except where the 15th and 19th Amendments apply. The 24th Amendment was passed by Congress on August 27, 1962, and ratified on January 23, 1964. It says a citizen cannot be kept from voting in federal elections for failing to pay a poll tax or other tax, and it was passed to end a payment, the poll tax, that had been used to limit voting. In 1966 the Supreme Court decided Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections and held Virginia's poll tax unconstitutional, which extended the ban on poll taxes to state elections.
Congress passed Civil Rights Acts in 1957, 1960, and 1964, but they were not strong enough to prevent voting discrimination by local officials. Events in Mississippi in 1964 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 gained national attention and helped persuade President Johnson and Congress to start national voting rights legislation. On March 15, 1965, Johnson urged Congress to pass legislation “which will make it impossible to thwart the 15th Amendment.” Congress passed the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965, and President Lyndon Johnson signed it the next day.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and provided for federal examiners with the power to register qualified citizens to vote in certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination. Section 2 closely followed the 15th Amendment's wording and banned denying or limiting the right to vote because of race or color anywhere in the nation. The Act was extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982. It was the most significant change in the relationship between the federal and state governments in the area of voting since Reconstruction, and it was challenged in the courts right away.
Before the 26th Amendment, the voting age in most states was 21. A first attempt to lower the voting age came during World War II, when the draft age was lowered to eighteen; it was unsuccessful. In the 1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower signaled his support for lowering the voting age. In 1970 Congress lowered the voting age to 18 in an extension of the Voting Rights Act. Two states sued, and in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) the Supreme Court upheld the states' claim to set their own voting-age rules. In response, an amendment was introduced in Congress, spurred by student activism during the Vietnam War and by the fact that 18-year-olds could be drafted but in most states could not vote in federal elections. The 26th Amendment was passed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and ratified on July 1, 1971.
Once many people could vote, open voting was no longer tolerable because it could involve undue influence, from hidden persuasion and bribery to intimidation, coercion, and punishment, and secret voting greatly lowers the chance of undue influence. Victoria and South Australia were the first Australian states to introduce a secret ballot, in 1856, which is why it is called the Australian ballot. The secrecy of the vote was a first and necessary administrative step toward the one person, one vote principle. In Great Britain the secret ballot was introduced for all parliamentary and municipal elections by the Ballot Act of 1872. In the United States the Australian ballot was widely adopted after the presidential election of 1884.
As of November 2026, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. It is the system by which the president and vice president are chosen. Each state has as many electors as it has members of Congress: one for each House member plus two senators. The Electoral College was made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a compromise between a vote in Congress and a popular vote. Article II of the Constitution let states pick electors in any manner they chose, in a number equal to their representation in Congress. By 1836 South Carolina was the only state where the legislature, not the voters, still chose the electors; it kept doing so until after the Civil War. In 1787 at least four ways to choose the President were proposed: by Congress, by state governors, by state legislatures, or by a direct vote of the voters. Under the original plan, electors voted for two people, and the person with the most votes, if a majority, became president and the next vice president. If no one had a majority, the House of Representatives chose among the top five. A tie in 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr led to the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which required separate votes for President and Vice President.
As of November 2026, a post-election audit checks that the equipment and procedures used to count votes worked properly, using a hand count of paper records. Post-election audits are done whatever the margin of victory, unlike recounts, which are most often triggered when the margin is tight. An audit can lead to a full recount if errors are found. Thirty-one states and Washington, D.C., require post-election audits to be completed before an election can be certified; ten states complete the audit after certification. All 50 states and Washington, D.C., conduct some type of post-election audit. In a post-election audit only a sample of the paper records is typically checked, so it is in effect a partial recount that checks whether the voting system recorded and counted votes accurately.
Words to know
- consent: agreement
- electorate: all voters
- suffrage: right to vote
- ratified: formally approved
- audit: check of records
