Where is voting in the constitution

House of Representatives. Under the Articles of Confederation, delegates to the Confederation Congress were selected as state legislatures directed. Only two states gave the People a say in the selection of delegates. Elsewhere, the state legislatures chose Confederation Congress delegates. While some members of the Constitutional Convention supported giving state legislatures control over the selection of House members, James Madison and James Wilson successfully argued that direct elections were necessary to connect the national government to the people.

The Heritage Guide to the Constitution 49 Of course, not all of the people were eligible to vote at the time of ratification.

Article I, Section 2 made the qualifications for voting in U. House elections the same as those for voting in the larger branch of the state legislature. That effectively excluded women, as well as many free African Americans and Native Americans.

It also excluded some white men, who were barred from voting by property ownership requirements that were the norm in Some Framers favored making property ownership a qualification for voting in U. A uniform suffrage requirement was ultimately rejected, due to fears that it would lead some states to reject the Constitution altogether.

The compromise—tying the qualifications for voting in U. House elections to the qualifications for voting in state legislative elections—allowed roughly two-thirds of white men—but very few others—to vote.

Nevertheless, these direct elections were a significant milestone in the development of democracy. Many more people were eligible to vote in U. House elections than was the case under English law. In the ensuing decades, states moved rapidly toward universal suffrage for white men. The Fifteenth Amendment , adopted in , prohibited denial of the vote on account of race, though in practice African-Americans were denied that right in southern states for much of the twentieth century.

Women gained a constitutional right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment in The short list of qualifications for serving in the U.

House was also a step toward a more inclusive democracy. Article I, Section 2 imposed just three qualifications for members of the House. Members must: 1 be at least twenty-five years old, 2 have been a citizen for seven years, and 3 be an inhabitant of the state from which he is selected. That was less stringent than those applicable to state legislators in most states, all but one of which required property ownership.

Powell v. McCormack ; U. Term Limits, Inc. Thorton To ensure that House members were accountable to the people, Article I, Section 2 provided for relatively frequent elections, to take place every two years.

This contrasted with the terms of Senators under Article I, Section 3, which take place every six years. Wesberry v. Sanders House elections. Later cases establish that congressional districts must be closer to mathematical equality than state legislative districts, which are subject to the one person, one vote requirement under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While state legislative districts are generally presumed to be constitutional if their total deviation from population equality is less than ten percent, the Court has rejected even the tiniest departures from population equality in drawing U.

House districts. Congressional redistricting plans with a deviation of less than one percent have been deemed unconstitutional under Article I, Section 2. See, e. Daggett It also provided that each state shall have at least one U. House member. Article I, Section 2 also included one of the most infamous provisions of the U. Yet the import of this Clause is sometimes misunderstood. At the Convention, slaveholding states wanted to count slaves for apportionment purposes, which would have increased the number of representatives to which the southern states were entitled.

Because slaves were not allowed to vote, this would have given eligible voters in southern states relatively more power than those in northern states, making abolition less likely. At the same time, the southern states did not want to count slaves at all for purposes of determining the direct taxes that the federal government could lay on the states, because that would increase their tax burden.

The decision to count sixty percent of the slave population actually reduced the power of the southern states, compared to what it would have been if the entire slave population had been counted.

The 15th Amendment gave African American men the right to vote in But many weren't able to exercise this right. Some states used literacy tests and other barriers to make it harder to vote. The 19th Amendment , ratified in , gave American women the right to vote. The 24th Amendment , ratified in , eliminated poll taxes.

The tax had been used in some states to keep African Americans from voting in federal elections. The 26th Amendment , ratified in , lowered the voting age for all elections to The Civil Rights Acts created some of the earliest federal protections against discrimination in voting.

These protections were first outlined by the Civil Rights Act of and were later amended by the Civil Rights Acts of. The Voting Rights Act of prohibited voter discrimination based on race, color, or membership in a language minority group. It also required certain places to provide election materials in languages besides English. The Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of required polling places to be accessible to people with disabilities.

It also called for states to keep more accurate voter registration lists. It also created the U. Learn more about states' voter ID requirements.

Federal election crimes fall into three broad categories:. Campaign finance crimes, such as when candidates accept funds that violate the amounts or donors permitted under the law. As the nation grew, the idea of universal white male suffrage — championed by the commoner-President Andrew Jackson — became an article of popular faith, if not a constitutional right. After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment , ratified in , guaranteed that the right to vote would not be denied on account of race: If some white people could vote, so could similarly qualified nonwhite people.

Similarly, the 19th Amendment , now years old, banned voting discrimination on the basis of sex, but did not recognize an inherent right to vote. Today, the country remains engaged in a long-running debate about what counts as voter suppression versus what are legitimate limits or regulations on voting — like requiring voters to provide identification, barring felons from voting or removing infrequent voters from the rolls.

The national debate over representation and rights is the product of a long-run movement toward mass voting paired with the longstanding fear of its results.

The nation has evolved from being led by an elitist set of beliefs toward a much more universal and inclusive set of assumptions. Many Americans support their own rights to free speech but want to suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree.

Americans may have come to believe in a universal vote, but that value does not come from the Constitution, which saw a different path to the protection of rights. Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.