So, do we really have a "right" to vote in America?

First, go to this site and read the article fully. Come on, I know he's the big hucksters boy, and kind of a commie jackass, but I've seen him on C-Span talking about this issue, and I think, to a degree, he makes a very good point. Now, lets allow the Rantasaurus Rex to heave himself up on his haunches and give you his understanding of things.

Our political heritage begins in England, about 300 or 400 years ago, where voting was originally considered a privilege. It was a privilege of birth, property and social status. The government also required religious affiliation, thinking that they needed to promote the "true faith" and keep "heretics" from corrupting the society. The right to vote was thought to be so important that it had to be limited to men with property, from the right faith, who had something to lose if political instability developed. It couldn't be left to the poor, because they would shake up the system, out vote every other group in the population, and vote for the first demagogue to offer them a sandwich and a sturdy roof over their head. So, voting standards have always been set up partly to protect the vested interests of one group of people, the establishment, and reformers have always been trying to widen the voting standard to see that those privileges are extended to their group of people. So the fight over voting has spanned the history of Democracy itself.

In this country, huge changes began to happen in the 1800s, when the right to vote began to be extended to poor men. Our system was set up with each state allowed to make the determination for itself. The British colonies had always had their own voting standards for electing local colonial officials, and after the revolution, some newly independent states allowed free Blacks to vote, and one (New Jersey) granted women with property the right to vote when they ratified their original state constitution in 1777. Ben Franklin proposed a universal, national voting standard in the constitutional convention in Philly in 1787, but the States couldn't agree on a common standard. States like Virginia, which still had extensive property qualifications, refused to give them up, and the others refused to accept limits on their more open systems, so the delegates agreed to leave it to the individual states to decide. That's the magic of Federalism; each state doing it's own thing, to a degree. The religious standards of the old days were banished by the first amendment to the national bill of rights, adopted in the 1790s.

So, the system we have now is based on the practice of allowing each state to decide their own voting standard, which allowed each new state, like Tennessee or Kentucky (set up in the 1790s) to open up their standard by getting rid of property qualifications, leaving them with gender, race, residence and age (21 was the age of adulthood everywhere). Of course, it was mostly poor people who went west, and they got rid of property qualifications as they went, reestablishing old institutions on more democratic lines as time went by. Eventually, as the political parties were established, the eastern states were pressured to adopt the more open systems of the west. That's how things went. Different standards led to the adoption of wider standards.

When the political parties began to be set up in the early 1800s, the parties had a vested interest in seeing to it that a level of rights existed to allow them to get as many voters to the polls as they could round up. As poor white men steadily became the dominant voting block, the system changed to reflect their interests and prejudices. Politics went from being a realm of rich men to being a populist game of kissing babies and shaking hands. Rich men had always wanted people in power to be reluctant to have it, so they looked for the ideal of the statesman. This is a major reason why Washington was so revered. But by the 1820s or 30s, guys like Andrew Jackson were the ideal; self made men who had risen up from poverty to become rich land owners and Indian fighters. Poor men looked up to that ideal, and wanted rich guys like Jackson to stand in the muddy street with them, toe to toe, look them eye to eye and embrace them as political equals. people like Jackson, who had no problem doing that, rose to the top. The Federalists couldn't adjust themselves to this changing reality, viewing it as appealing to the passions of the mob, so they slowly became more and more marginalized in the country until they almost completely ceased to exist. The Democrats embraced the change, and steadily turned into the dominant faction/party in the nation.

By the time of the Civil War, the unofficial voting standard in the nation had developed into "universal adult white male suffrage". Black men could still vote in a few New England states, but New Jersey had abolished the right to vote for woman by state statute in about 1787 or 88. Anyone who got in the way of poor white men running everything was disenfranchised or outnumbered and rendered harmless through some official mechanism. Then, in the wake of the war, the 14th and 15th amendments are drafted and passed, granting each citizen at the state level a protection for the privileges and/or immunities of national citizenship, including voting, and an equal protection of the laws of the United States (the due process provision was nullified in a supreme court decision in the 1870s). These protections were originally designed to protect former slaves (now referred to as "Freedmen") from the restriction of their rights by their state governments. But the 20th century will see them extended to all American citizens regardless of "previous condition of servitude", and the late 18th century concept that "the constitution follows the flag" will see them extended to anyone else who falls into our hands (debate still rages on that one).

During Radical Reconstruction, Black men were allowed to register and vote in the south, but there were loopholes in these provisions that allowed states to still control voter registration systems. So eventually, as the Reconstruction system broke down, states could use these loopholes to begin to restrict voting rights by restricting who had the right to register to vote. Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other provisions are set up to allow local majorities to protect their own power by restricting other peoples rights to register to vote, and the KKK was always there to deal with anyone who was too persistent in trying. The next time there was a significant challenge to the control Democrats had over southern states came in 1892, when farmers and urban workers joined to set up a third party called the Peoples Party. More people were lynched in the south in that year than in any other year in American history, and miraculously, the Democratic candidate won the national election for President.

By the 1870s, women were gaining the right to vote on a state by state basis. Having been shut out of the 14th and 15th amendments, they began working for their own inclusion, and the "Suffragette" movement got rolling. The new national standards or the 14th and 15th amendments didn't mean that the standards couldn't be expanded. By the time the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, women had been granted the right to vote in about 6 or 8 western states, including in Texas, where women got the right in 1918.

The next change comes, of course in the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 60s. The 24th amendment got rid of the poll tax in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 got rid of the other shenanigans that were set up to prohibit the right to register from being exercised. Then, due to Vietnam and the hope that the kids out there would all vote for McGovern in 1972, the Democrats pushed through an amendment lowering the minimum age to 18. Turns out most of the kids didn't bother to vote (and still don't), and those that did mostly voted for Nixon, like their parents. Each state still establishes voting registration requirements, but the feds oversee them and can intervene if the states try to set something up that looks like it's designed to infringe on peoples rights. So, today you do have a "right to vote" so long as you live up to the registration qualifications laid out in your state, overseen by the national government. After all this history, and all these changes, the system is now set up to allow the vast majority of people to go ahead and vote, and yet many of those who are qualified don't even register. Voting has gone from a privilege, to a right, to an option that many people completely blow off.

The points Jackson makes about individual election irregularities are quite valid. Irregularities still take place, and both sides still try to rig things in their favor from time to time, trying to protect what they have or ensure their people a leg up. Elections are human things, and we know what human beings are like. Jackson makes valid points, but what he wants is basically to establish a national standard that says people have a "right" to vote regardless of state provisions. He wants the system of Federalism to be set aside and a centralized national system set up to force every citizen to get a chance to cast a ballot and have every ballot counted, no matter what. So, if you showed up to vote a day after the polls close, they'd have to reopen them so you could vote, because you have a "right" to and they can't stop you from exercising it.

So, elections would never end, or take months and months to decide, as Jackson and his minions go out in buses to round up unregistered homeless, poor or elderly people who have no idea who to vote for, other than who Jackson's people will tell them to vote for. He wants a purely majoritarian system, where all the poor people in the cities and countryside will theoretically join in a new majority to out vote the rest of us, and create his idea of a true democracy. Thing is, He'll need the votes of the rest of us to get it passed, and it ain't happenin'. A purely majoritarian system is NOT what our constitution provides for. They debated such a system in Philly in 1787, and they decided against it. Too much fear of the "mob", and what they might do if empowered. Today, he's got to show me how my life will be bettered by such a change, and I don't think he can.

Personally, I have NO PROBLEM with the idea of keeping the hordes of the unwashed and their ever expanding sense of entitlement from getting their hands fully on our government and tax structure. As a person who regularly votes and pays a good deal of taxes, I can't see why it is that others find it hard to register, or make the trip to the voting booth on time, or fill out their ballot correctly. I don't feel our system is somehow diminished because people who are ether too stupid, too lazy, or too politically cynical to show up and cast their vote don't like the results they get. That's how the system works. Democracy doesn't promise good government, but only the odds of maybe having a better government through the right to participate. Those who participate the most, or the most intelligently, get the most out of it. So, if you can find the line for the government hand-out, don't try to tell me that you can't find the line at the voting booth.

As far as not having an expressly stated "right" to vote is concerned, it's perfectly true. It doesn't say it clearly in there anywhere. We don't have an expressly stated right to privacy ether, but that doesn't stop us from exercising it. Don't tell abortion rights activists we don't have it. They'll tell you otherwise. It doesn't say "one person, one vote" in there anywhere ether, or "separation of church and state". It turns out that much of the constitution is written ambiguously, and that a lot of our rights (or our perceptions of what our rights are) are based on some judges interpretations of the grey areas in the document, rather than clearly written provisions. That's the way it always been, and there's no getting away from it. I guess we could have a new constitutional convention, but the last time we did that (1787) the delegates closed themselves off from the public and produced a radically different document than the one everyone was expecting. Do you trust our current leaders to do that?

Personally, I'd like to see various new qualifications set up for voting, like a new literacy test, or maybe a higher age requirement. Voting SHOULD be a privilege of citizenship, and people SHOULD have to qualify for it somehow. You have to take a test to drive, for Christs sake. But then, I also think people should have to take a test to qualify to have babies. The last thing we need is to allow the teaming masses to get their hands on our wallets. It's bad enough that we've built our modern political system based on welfare dependency, and that every segment of our society has drunk the Kool Aid and developed it's own sense of entitlement for the benefits it gets (especially the middle-class). It's another thing to down the whole jug of Kool Aid and turn our constitution over to the people who know and care the least about it, or who only care about the system so long as it gives them what they want. Of course, mine is not the popular view, but there you go.