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Constitutional Amendments Dealing with Voting

Annotation

By the end of the Civil War many Northerners believed that changes for African Americans should go beyond simply ending slavery. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reflects that desire—it makes it illegal to deny people the right to vote on account of race. It is a remarkable change—just a decade earlier, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had ruled that the "the Negro had no rights a white man was bound to respect." Now the constitution outlawed racial discrimination in matters relating to a citizen's rights. Although, this amendment would be blatantly ignored over the next century, as Southern states systematically denied black people the right to vote. Nonetheless, it formed the basis for the Nineteenth Amendment, which eliminated sex restrictions on voting. African Americans would not see the promise of the Fifteenth amendment fulfilled until the long struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s produced new voting rights legislation.

Amendment XV (1870)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIX (1920)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Source

U.S. Constitution, amend. 15 and 19.

Much of the history of voting in America has been the story of the expansion and contraction of the voting rights. The invention and use of the 1898 Standard Voting Machine coincided with concern among progressive reformers about fraud and corruption in the electoral process. However, the story of progressive reform should be situated within the larger story of the struggle for voting rights among African Americans and women, and the attempt of the American polity to grapple with the question of whether the large numbers of newly arrived immigrants were fit to participate in civic life.