Examine the election and voting process.

The Voting Process

The formal requirements for voting in the United States are simple: anyone who is a citizen of the United States of America and at least eighteen years of age is eligible to vote. Voters must also be legal residents of the state in which the election is being held. Additionally, every state but North Dakota requires voters to register to vote a reasonable number of days before the election (usually thirty days). The primary objective of the registration requirement is to prevent fraudulent voting. A secondary effect of requiring voters to register, however, is that only those who are interested and attentive are likely to vote. A month or more before election day, a voter must find out where to register and then go there and register or he or she will not be able to vote on election day. Registering to vote, however, was made much easier with the passage of the “Motor Voter” Act of 1993, which allows citizens to register to vote when they renew their driver’s licenses or visit local, state, or national government offices for other purposes.

Who Can Vote?

The right to vote is sometimes referred to as “suffrage.” The right of suffrage in the United States is currently enjoyed by all citizens over the age of eighteen, as noted. However, this has not always been the case. In the early years of the republic, the eligible electorate consisted primarily of white, male property owners. States gradually relaxed property-ownership requirements until all white males of twenty-one years or more were allowed to vote. After the Civil War, the right to vote was extended to all citizens, regardless of race, by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Women’s Suffrage Movement succeeded with the Nineteenth Amendment and the extension of the right to vote to women (some states already allowed women to vote, but the amendment required all states to do so). The Twenty-third Amendment allotted electoral votes to the District of Columbia, thereby giving its residents the right to vote in presidential elections. This is an often overlooked group of voters, but they become very important when calculating the number of electoral votes, as you will see later in the lesson. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, granted the right to vote to every citizen that is eighteen years or older.

Although voting rights are extended by the Constitution, they aren't always exercised. Most notably, black voters did not fully enjoy the right to vote for many years after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment because of intimidation, discrimination, and tactics such as literacy tests and poll taxes. Moreover, many people who have the right to vote simply choose not to exercise it. Millions of eligible voters have not even registered to vote.