Right to Vote
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Advancement Project's Right to Vote initiative is an extension of U.S. Representative Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.'s pioneering work (House Joint Resolution 28), which spearheaded the most recent movement to enshrine the right to vote into the U.S. Constitution by amendment. Advancement Project's Right to Vote Public Education Initiative seeks to increase public awareness of the need for stronger voting rights enforcement, including the ramifications of an affirmative, federally protected right to vote. Our current activities include legal/ policy research and analysis; research on public opinion and attitudes; outreach to important stakeholders and development of a strategic public education plan.
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Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that there is no provision of U.S. law that affirmatively guarantees citizens the right to vote. No such right is explicitly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the 1965 Voting Rights Act or any other federal legislation. Even the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution do not explicitly guarantee the fundamental right to vote to all citizens. They prohibit discrimination on account of race, sex, language, ethnicity, religion and age, but the states decide in the first instance who is qualified to vote and whether and when elections should even be held. The Supreme Court majority in the Bush v. Gore case concluded: "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States." (531 U.S. 98, 104 (2000)). The U.S. is one of only eleven of the 119 democratic countries in the world that do not explicitly provide the right to vote in their Constitutions. Both the Afghan Constitution and the Interim Iraqi Constitution guarantee the right to vote.
Without a federal guarantee of the right to vote, states use their control over this basic citizenship right in a patchwork quilt of arbitrary rules with vast consequences for close elections. Georgia and Indiana, for example, just passed laws limiting the right to vote to citizens who can show a photo identification, thus disenfranchising elderly voters who do not have driver's licenses and poor people who cannot afford a car. Ohio, in 2004, left important decisions about voter registration and provisional ballot requirements to the Secretary of State, who was also the Chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio. Because of voting machine shortages in certain precincts, thousands of predominantly African-American voters in Ohio were left freezing for 9 hours waiting in the rain to vote. Florida and several other states use state power over voting to disenfranchise those who have committed crimes even after they have completed their sentences.
The qualifications and rules for all elections in the U.S. are determined primarily at state and local level, with over 13,000 jurisdictions setting their own requirements and procedures. The vast dispersion of authority over elections is a major obstacle to efforts to eliminate structural disenfranchisement. Democracy advocates literally have to monitor and negotiate with thousands of local jurisdictions over issues such as how missing information on voter registration forms is handled, when and under what circumstances voters are "purged" i.e., removed from the rolls, what types of election equipment are used and how that equipment is allocated among precincts and how poll workers are trained.
