Departments

Voting - Your Right - Your Privilege - Your Duty
By Region 8 Webmaster John Davis

Tuesday November 02, 2004 is National Election Day. Many UAW represented business will be closed in observance of the holiday.

All across the country citizens will be going to the polls to cast their ballot to determine our nation’s leadership. Voting is not only a privilege, but also a responsibility. Our right to vote has been bought through the blood of hundred’s of thousands of our brave military personnel through the years. By not voting, we dishonor those sacrifices.

The right to vote should never be taken lightly. All Americans have not always been included in this right, and it has taken the struggles of many to see that this freedom is extended to all American citizens.

Our founding fathers wrestled with the question of who had the right to vote. Many felt that property owners alone should have the right, while others argued that only a true democracy guaranteed a voice for all its citizens. Eventually, the authors of the Constitution decided to leave the question of vote up to individual states. However, this proved to be a mistake, for only property holders were granted voting rights in most states.

Frontiersman and President Andrew Jackson was a strong advocate of extending voting rights to those who did not own property and paved the way for the expansion of voting rights to all men. By 1860, all white men had gained the right to vote, but African Americans, women, Native Americans and non-English speaking citizens still found themselves outside the group of those with the right.

In 1870 Congress passed the Fifteenth amendment, which stated “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.” However, states found loopholes by adding poll taxes and grandfather clauses to deny the right of many to vote. It would be 1964 and the Twenty-Fourth amendment before the use of poll taxes would be abolished. The 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited the use of literacy test at the polls, to finally open up voting to all American citizens.

James Madison’s wife Abigail asked him to include females in the Declaration of Independence but he ignored her request. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 defined citizens as males, further blocking a women’s right to vote. Famous women such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Alice Paul kept the fight up for a women’s right to vote, which was finally granted with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, which at last enfranchised females into the voting process.

Native Americans gained the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, but it would be 1934 and the Snyder Act before Native Americans would gain the right to vote without restrictions.

So, remember tomorrow that your right to vote has not come easy. It was won on battlefields, in trenches and in the halls of justice by brave citizens who defended the idea of true democracy. It is your right, your privilege, your responsibility and your duty.