Intro
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ALT: National Women’s Party Headquarters (AP Images)
Voting eligibility has been a persistent question in American history. From the nation’s founding, the franchise gradually has expanded from a ballot limited to white, male property-owners to a universal franchise for nearly everyone over the age of 18. Each expansion was hard-fought, earned over years, sometimes decades, of work by dedicated activists and courageous leaders.
1787
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ALT: Constitution Convention (AP Images)
Credit: © AP Images
The U.S. Constitution left voting eligibility to state jurisdiction. Most states granted the vote only to white men age 21 and over who owned property and paid taxes. No women or American Indians could vote and, although a few Northern states permitted a small number of free black men to vote, slavery and stringent state requirements restricted voting almost exclusively to white males.
1848
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ALT: Statues in Seneca Falls (AP Images)
The women’s suffrage movement begins at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott lead a convention “to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman.” The Seneca Falls meeting, decades later honored with bronze statutes at the meeting site, lays the foundation for the women’s rights movement.
1869
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: Wyoming women voters (AP Images)
Governor John A. Campbell signs a bill passed by the Wyoming Territorial Legislature that approves full suffrage for women. Wyoming territory gives women the right to vote. Other jurisdictions, including Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Washington and California, will follow suit in subsequent years.
1870
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Credit: Library of Congress
ALT: President Grant signs 15th Amendment (Library of Congress)
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude, superseding state laws that prohibited black voting. Two laws -- the Enforcement Act of 1870, which set criminal penalties for interfering with voting rights, and the Force Act of 1871, which provided for federal election oversight -- helped implement the amendment.
1920
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: National Women’s Party Headquarters (AP Images)
The 19th Amendment gives the right to vote to all women age 21 and older when the Tennessee House of Representatives ratifies the amendment by a single-vote margin. With most southern states adamantly opposed to the change, the amendment had faced an uphill battle for ratification.
1924
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: President Coolidge with members of Sioux Nation (AP Images)
The federal Indian Citizenship Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, grants U.S. citizenship to the indigenous peoples of the United States. Distinguished military service in World War I by many American Indians helped secure support for the legislation.
1944
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: Southern blacks register to vote (AP Images)
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that blacks cannot be denied the right to participate in primary elections. That ruling, which triggered increases in black voter registration in the southern states, gives African Americans fuller participation in party politics. The case, Smith v. Allwright, was argued successfully by Thurgood Marshall, a future Supreme Court justice.
1964
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: New voters take registration oath (AP Images)
The 24th Amendment prohibits federal and state governments from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. Poll taxes had been enacted in 11 Southern states in the late 19th century to keep the poor -- who also were likely to be black -- from voting. As a result, voter registration surges again.
1965
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ALT: President Johnson at bill signing (AP Images)
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires the federal government to enforce voting rights in Southern states and anywhere else where it found a pattern of discrimination. The act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for discrimination to be the greatest.
1970
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Credit: © St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ALT: Cartoon of literacy test requirements (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
The Voting Rights Act of 1970 bans literacy tests as a condition for voting. It also sets 30 days as the maximum permissible residency for eligibility to vote in a presidential election.
1971
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: Demonstrators protest in front of White House (AP Images)
The 26th Amendment establishes 18 as the age at which citizens have the right to vote. Impetus for this action lay in the protests against the American military engagement in Vietnam, the military draft to support that engagement and the argument that if one was old enough to fight for his country he should have a say in the country’s government.
1990
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Credit: © AP Images
ALT: California voter casts ballot (AP Images)
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that all Americans, regardless of physical limitations, must be given access to the polls and to the ballot. Voting by Americans with disabilities would increase steadily across the next four presidential election cycles.