Voting Rights In America

ne of the most important duties that an American citizen has to do is vote. The issue of voting rights in the United States has been fighting through history. Voting rights have been established in The U.S Constitution. Voting rights have also been considered an issue linked to electoral systems, especially since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. In 1972, the US Supreme Court decreed that state legislatures had to redistrict every ten years based on the results. Many states had not redistricted for decades. The Supreme Court required that both households of all state legislatures had to be based on election districts that had to be equal in population size, under the one man one vote principle. Voting has been challenged when found to

Some of the new laws are harsher than others, and some are still being processed in the courts. “The outcomes of some of the tightest races this year could turn on the application of controversial new voting rules. Strict voter ID laws have gotten most of the attention, but are only part of the story. Cutbacks to early voting and voter registration opportunities, and other idiosyncratic changes to voting rules, have the potential to do just as much damage.”(R. Weiser). Also, after the last elections, state lawmakers have introduced lots of bills to restrict voting for the next election. The first year state lawmakers were successful and new laws passed, simply they were weakened or stopped by the Department of justice and Citizen Initiatives later the year. Some states are still making new voting restrictions. One of the new voting laws that some state has adopted is that voters required to show a government issued photo IDs at the polls. Some other states make it easier to vote and you only need to show your state issued student IDs while other state make it harder to vote. For, example In ten states is harder to vote because they include “laws curbing voter registration drives (in Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia); rules requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering (in Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and previously in Arizona); laws eliminating the highly popular same-day registration (in Nebraska and North Carolina); and a law making it harder for people who move to stay registered (in Wisconsin).” (R. Weiser). In other states like Florida and Iowa they have a restriction that that makes it harder to vote for people with past convictions. “Nationally, 5.85 million Americans who have done their time have lost the right to vote; 1.5 million are in Florida. Overall, 7.7 percent of African Americans have lost their right