Voting:

1. Voting: A Privilege or a Right?

2. The Power of the Vote • My vote is my voice . . .and the voice of all who struggled that I may have my voice. • Lylda C. Obasi, college student • The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice . . . • Lyndon B. Johnson, U. S. president

3. In 1776 . . . • Who could vote? • WHITE MEN 21 AND OLDER, WHO OWNED PROPERTY • Property owners “had a stake.” • Property owners “could be independent.”

4. What the Constitution said…and didn’t say • Article 1, Section 2 addresses elections to the House of Representatives by electors • Article 2, Section 1 discusses presidential electors • Article 4 mandates the federal government to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” • Not until the 14th and 15th Amendments do the words “right to vote” appear in the Constitution!

5. Who should be allowed to vote? • Sir William Blackstone said: • “The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. [Such people] are excluded from voting, in order to set up other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.” • Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1760s

6. Who should be allowed to vote? • John Adams said: • “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end of it. . .” • 1776

7. Who should be allowed to vote? • Thomas Paine said: • “The true and only basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, . . .” • Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, 1795

8. Who should be allowed to vote? • Benjamin Franklin said: • “Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies . . . Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass? • The Casket, or Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, 1828

9. Who should be allowed to vote? • Alexis de Tocqueville said: • “Once a people begins to interfere with the voting qualification, one can be sure that sooner or later it will abolish it altogether. . . The further the limit of voting rights is extended, the stronger is the need felt to spread them still wider . . . and there is no halting place until universal suffrage has been attained.” • Democracy in America, 1835

10. Who should be allowed to vote? • Frederick Douglass said: • “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the vote.” • Speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1865

11. Who should be allowed to vote? • Susan B. Anthony said: • “It was we, the people; not we, the while male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. . . And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government—the ballot.” • Speech After Being Convicted of Voting in the 1872 Presidential election, 1873

12. Who should be allowed to vote? • Martin Luther King, Jr. said: • “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot live as a democratic citizen . . . So our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.” • Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, 1957

13. Who should be allowed to vote? • Young people said: • “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote!” • Americans beginning after Pearl Harbor—26th Amendment, 1971

14. Expanding the franchise