Voting under the federal constitution

This chapter examines how the federal Constitution protects the right to vote and how the United States became a full-fledged democracy over the course of two centuries and several constitutional amendments. As originally written, the Constitution entrusted states with authority to set voting qualifications for both state and federal elections. While democratic for its time, the Founding-era electorate was largely limited to property-owning white men. In response to social movements and wartime pressures, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments, which barred discrimination in voting on account of race, sex, inability to pay a poll tax, and age, respectively. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court expanded the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to cover non-race-based voting qualifications, even though that clause was originally understood to exclude the right to vote. Given the ascendance of originalism and disrespect for stare decisis on the current Supreme Court, many of these Warren Court decisions are at serious risk of reconsideration. This chapter concludes by identifying alternative paths for protecting the right to vote under the federal Constitution beyond the original public understanding of the Equal Protection Clause.