03 February 2010

Voting: A Right and a Responsibility

 

Voters line up on Election Day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Voters line up on Election Day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

This article is excerpted from the book American Citizenship, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 4.57MB).

Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president of the United States (1861–1865), perhaps best described democracy as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” There is no government “by the people,” however, unless citizens choose their leaders through free and fair elections. Voting is a fundamental right and responsibility of U.S. citizens — the right to have a say in how they are governed and the responsibility to be informed about candidates and issues when they go to the polls.

The United States was founded, in large part, on the desire of its people to participate in the decisions of their government. Surprisingly, perhaps, the U.S. Constitution itself did not address the right to vote or who was eligible to participate. The prevailing view when the Constitution was written in 1787 was that only men who owned property were qualified to vote, because they had an interest in preserving society to protect their wealth and because they had the independence and education to decide important political matters.

Fortunately, times change. By the mid–19^th century, property requirements were dismantled and virtually all adult white males were able to vote. Soon after, the United States engaged in the Civil War (1861–1865) over the right of states to allow slavery within their borders. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in 1865; the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens and established the voting age as 21 years; and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 stated that no citizen should be denied the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

This was progress, but half of the U.S. population still could not vote: women. Agitation for universal suffrage began in the mid–19^th century, but the turning point came when the United States entered World War I in 1917. How could the United States fight for democracy overseas while denying it to half the population at home? Obviously, it could not, and the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.

In the mid–20^th century, another foreign conflict led to expansion of the franchise. Thousands of young Americans fought in the Vietnam War, many of them teenagers. They were old enough to fight for their country, yet not old enough to vote. Public outcry and political will led to passage of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, granting the vote to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds in 1971.

In spite of the many struggles to guarantee all citizens the right to vote, the percentage of Americans who exercise that right declined during the second half of the 20^th century. No single reason explains this trend. Some citizens may feel that their single vote does not make a difference; some may lose interest in campaigns run primarily through the media. Others may simply be too busy to go to the polls every time there is an election. Americans vote for every political office from school board member to state legislator to congressional representative to president of the United States, as well as on a host of state and local matters. Often, citizens are asked to vote on something several times in one year. The challenge of citizenship is to get to know the candidates and to understand the issues in order to vote responsibly.

An apparent shift in the low-turnout trend occurred between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The historically close election of 2000 perhaps convinced voters that every vote does matter, and voter turnout increased from 60 percent of eligible voters in 2000 to 64 percent in 2004 and 2008. The increase in voters between the ages of 18 and 29 was even more dramatic. Project Vote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to empower under-represented voters, estimates that turnout in this age group increased in 2008 by 9 percent from 2004.