Through the decades, the right to vote in U.S. elections has seen massive change and expansion.
Since America’s founding days, when voting was limited to white male property owners, to the transformative Voting Rights Act of 1965, to sweeping voting process reform introduced in the early 2000s, the right to vote in U.S. elections has seen massive change.
The original Constitution left voting rights to the states for a range of reasons, including a compromise over slavery and the fact that the concept of setting up a representative democracy was new, says David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota School of Law.
Why disability rights advocates are pressing the Senate to allow an internet voting option
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What Can Philanthropy Do to Protect and Expand Voting Rights? | Voting Rights | Carnegie Corporation of New York
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House Television via AP, File
Republicans and Democrats are at odds over a sweeping election bill that seeks to reform voting, campaign finance, and ethics laws.
The so-called For the People Act cleared the U.S. House last month with just one Democrat siding with unanimous GOP opposition.
Republican U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis said while Democrats claim the bill prevents voter suppression, that doesn t tell the whole story.
Campaign finance
Davis called the measure a Democratic power grab that reaches far beyond voting rights.
“This is not a For the People Act, as it s titled. This is not a voting rights bill. This is a For the Politicians Act, Davis said. This is the furthest thing from a voting rights bill that we can get to because, really, what this bill does that doesn t get a lot of reports about it is that it gives every single member of Congress the ability to get $7.2 million put into their own campaign accounts.”
April 6, 2021, 7:23 p.m. ET
Credit.Nitashia Johnson for The New York Times
Whenever you hear Republican rants about widespread voter fraud supposedly undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of their elections, remember the story of Crystal Mason.
Ms. Mason, a 46-year-old grandmother from the Fort Worth area, has been in the news on and off since 2016, when Texas prosecutors decided she was a vote fraudster so dangerous that justice demanded she be sentenced to five years behind bars.
Her offense? Visiting her local precinct on Election Day that year and casting a provisional ballot for president. Ms. Mason was not eligible to vote at the time because she was on supervised release after serving a prison term for federal tax fraud. Texas, like many states, bars those with criminal records from voting until they have finished all terms of a sentence.