Voting is how people get a say in what happens in their city, state or country. Every country that holds elections sets its own rules about who is allowed to vote. Today, most countries allow nearly all adult citizens to vote. Let's look at who was left out in the past, and how those rules changed.

Begin in Athens. The ancient Greeks were the first people to practice democracy in a community as large as a city. In Athens, all adult male citizens could take part in the Assembly. Women, children, foreign residents, and enslaved people were excluded. In the mid-4th century BC, adult male citizens were only about 12 percent of the people in the city. The Assembly could also vote to send away a citizen who had become too powerful. In that vote, voters wrote a name on a piece of broken pottery in a secret ballot.

Now move to the new United States. Owning property of a certain size or value was the earliest qualification for voters. From the 1820s through the 1850s, states abolished property and tax requirements for casting ballots. 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.

Next, women and the vote. In July 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention in New York launched the women's rights movement and also called for woman suffrage. Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote in all elections in 1869. In 1890 Wyoming became a state and the first whose constitution guaranteed women the right to vote. Between 1910 and 1919, twenty-four states and territories gave women full or partial voting rights.

Next, Congress and the states. On May 21, 1919, the House passed the 19th Amendment, and two weeks later the Senate followed. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify it, which gave it the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Yet the story did not stop there. After 1920, many women still could not vote for decades because of discriminatory state voting laws.

Look next at African Americans and the vote. The 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote. African Americans voted and held office in many Southern states through the 1880s. 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. Separately, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.

Events in Mississippi in 1964 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 gained national attention. They helped persuade President Johnson and Congress to start national voting rights legislation. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests. It also provided for federal examiners with the power to register qualified citizens to vote in certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination.

Age was another line. 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 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. An amendment was introduced in Congress. It was 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 ratified on July 1, 1971.

Other places made their own choices. Women in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States won the right to vote by 1920. Women in most other countries gained suffrage by the end of the 1900s. In some countries, notably Australia and Belgium, citizens are legally required to vote, and nonvoters can face fines, as of November 2026. In many small towns in New England, citizens hold town meetings to discuss and vote on local matters. Switzerland also gives citizens a direct voice through referenda and initiatives.

Now, the secret ballot and the count. 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. Today, a post-election audit checks that the equipment and procedures used to count votes worked properly, using a hand count of paper records, as of November 2026.

Words to know

• suffrage: right to vote
• ratified: approved
• referenda: direct votes
• audit: careful check