Which amendment guarantees the right to vote

They marched with torches: Getting out the vote, — During the 19th century, politics were central to social life, to the point where affiliation with a political party included actual Fannie Lou Hamer: Voting rights trailblazer.

Confronted with challenging primary source material as part of her research on the civil rights movement, Fellow Regina Sierra Carter was Subscribe to our feed Subscribe by e-mail. Categories American Agriculture. America Participates. Back to Our Roots. Business History. Director's Notes. Disability History. Donor Spotlight. Freedom Summer. From the Collections. Intern Perspectives. Jazz Appreciation.

Julia Child Recipe of the Week. Kids in Museums. Object Project. In , the Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes in state and local elections were also unconstitutional because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment set the legal voting age at eighteen.

The amendment left open how old someone must be in order to register to vote. While some states require people to be eighteen in order to register, others allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to pre-register. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers.

Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion. Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. Categories : Election terms Election policy tracking. Voter information What's on my ballot? They were creating a radical experiment in self-government paired with the protection of individual rights that are often resented by the majority.

As a result, they did not lay out an inherent right to vote because they feared rule by the masses would mean the destruction of — not better protection for — all the other rights the Constitution and Bill of Rights uphold. Instead, they highlighted other core rights over the vote, creating a tension that remains today. Many of the rights the founders enumerated protect small groups from the power of the majority — for instance, those who would say or publish unpopular statements, or practice unpopular religions, or hold more property than others.

James Madison, a principal architect of the U. Constitution and the drafter of the Bill of Rights, was an intellectual and landowner who saw the two as strongly linked. The Constitution left voting rules to individual states, which had long-standing laws limiting the vote to those freeholders. The founders believed that freedoms and rights would require the protection of an educated elite group of citizens, against an intolerant majority.

They understood that protected rights and mass voting could be contradictory. Research has also shown that ordinary Americans are remarkably ignorant of public policies and politicians , lacking even basic political knowledge.