Voting rights are legal and constitutional protections that ensure all citizens have access to local, state, and federal elections. The right to vote is fundamental to democracy. When voting rules are discriminatory, they diminish a citizen’s ability to exercise their right to participate in free, fair, and representative democratic processes.
The fight for voting rights is as old as America itself. It’s why we’re pushing states to prioritize the expansion of voting rights and the restoration of pre-clearance, a powerful tool that prevents racial segregation in our electoral system.
Before the Civil War, most states required potential voters to own property in a certain amount of value — a condition that effectively excluded free African-Americans, lower-class Whites, and Native Americans from the franchise. Those property requirements were often used to justify slavery, even after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
In the years that followed, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, and the Voting Rights Act was passed. The legislation outlawed literacy tests, outlawed laws that required a person to speak English in order to vote, and created the requirement that localities with “a history of racial discrimination” have any new voting practices or procedures reviewed by the U.S. Attorney General or the District of Columbia’s court.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2013, however, that the Section 2 of the Act was outdated and stripped individuals and civil rights organizations of the main pathway to protect voting rights. In response, several states began introducing laws meant to make it harder for their residents to vote.