Voting is how people get a say in what happens in their city, state or country. The right to vote has a name: suffrage. The word democracy means “rule by the people,” and it comes from Greek words. People choose representatives to make decisions for them in government. The history of voting starts with a question that sounds simple. Who counts as one of “the people”?

Athens had a democracy in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. The ancient Greeks were the first people to practice democracy in a community as large as a city. Direct democracy was practiced in small communities, where all or nearly all citizens could meet in an assembly. In the Athenian assembly, citizens voted by holding up their hands, and the majority won.

Athens had 30,000 to 60,000 male citizens in the 4th and 5th centuries BCE. The assembly met on the Pnyx hill, in a space that could hold about 6000 citizens. 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.

In the Roman assemblies, only adult male citizens took part. People voted not one by one but as members of assigned groups, or voting blocks. 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.

In 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.

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.

In July 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention in New York launched the women's rights movement and also called for woman suffrage. Women worked for decades to win the right to vote. 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.

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. Before the 19th Amendment, women won the vote in some states first, and western states led the way. An amendment to give women the vote was first introduced in Congress in 1878.

The 19th Amendment was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919. The House passed it on May 21, and two weeks later the Senate followed. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify it, on August 18, 1920, which gave it the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920. The amendment says the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied because of sex. It gave women the right to vote across the United States. But after 1920, many women still could not vote for decades because of discriminatory state voting laws.

The 15th Amendment was passed by Congress on February 26, 1869, and ratified on February 3, 1870. 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. 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.

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. They 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 Johnson signed it the next day. 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.

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.

In western Europe and North America adult male suffrage was ensured almost everywhere by 1920. Women's suffrage came later in some places: 1928 in Britain, 1944 in France, 1949 in Belgium and 1971 in Switzerland.

Words to know

• suffrage: right to vote
• democracy: rule by people
• assembly: meeting of citizens
• ratified: formally approved
• literacy: reading ability