Citizen Rights and Responsibilities Voting What does a citizen need to do to vote? You must register to vote. There are different ways to register in most places in the United States. You certainly can register in person. This normally takes place at a local voter registration or election office, or at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or even at a military recruitment center. You can also register by mail, as there is a National Voter Registration Form. You can obtain this form at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's website. Some states even allow persons to register online. If nothing else, google for voting and local election office. It generally is not hard to find. How do I actually vote? A common place where people vote is at a polling place. This is where you physically travel to the polling place. It could be at a local school, a local library, or some other public place. You generally show a form of identification, often a drivers' license, and then go over to a machine that votes. Generally, there are people there that can assist you with the machine and the ballot. There are also absentee ballots. These are for when a person really cannot get to the polls to vote, because they are in military service or out of the country for an extended period of time. In many locales, there is an early voting period. This means you don't have to vote on the actual day of the election when the lines are long and there could be a possible problem with the voting machines (hopefully this is quite rare). Is voting mandatory? No, while voting is considered an excellent civic responsibility, there is no law that actually requires someone to vote. Do states require photo ID? About 36 states require some form of photo identification in order to vote. There is a trend over the last decade or so to tighten photo ID laws in some states in order to combat possible voter fraud. Some contend that these laws are discriminatory. However, it is prudent to check the voter ID law in your state to make sure that you comply. For example, the state of Alabama requires a person to show photo identification in order to vote. Alabama accepts the following forms of identification as acceptable--a valid drivers' license or non-driving ID card, a passport, a valid student or employee ID card as long it has a photo, a valid government employee ID card with a photo, a military card with a photo, or a valid photo voter ID card. Other states do not require photo identification but allow other ways for a person to prove who they are. For example, in the state of Alaska, the following forms of identification are acceptable in order to vote --- an official voter registration card, a driver's license, a birth certificate, a passport, a hunting or fishing license, or a current utility bill, bank statement, or other government document with the voter's name and address. What happens if I go to vote at the wrong polling place? In some states, you may not be able to vote, or your ballot will not be counted. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Arizona law that required voters to vote in their own precinct. The Arizona law required voters who choose to vote in person on election day in a county that uses the precinct system must vote in their assigned precincts. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this Arizona law in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), reasoning that "Arizona's out-of-precinct rule enforces the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on election day must do so in their assigned precincts." In his majority opinion, Justice Alito added that "[h]aving to identify one's own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the usual burdens of voting." Can felons vote? In many states, a felony conviction precludes an individual, even a citizen, from voting even if the person has completed their sentence. These are called felon-disenfranchisement laws. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow prisoners to vote without restriction. Twenty-two states limit voting to those who are currently incarcerated. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington. Fifteen other states prohibit felons from voting if they are in prison, on parole, or on probation. These states include Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. When did African Americans get the right to vote? African Americans supposedly got the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 but unfortunately it took later legislation and Supreme Court decisions to ensure that right. The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests and other devices that were used to deprive African Americans of the right to vote. For example, in some states, individuals would apply different tests to African Americans and whites to determine whether one was eligible to vote. In 1975, Congress again extended the Voting Rights Act, enacting a permanent nationwide ban on the use of literacy tests and other similar devices, expanding the act to cover minority groups not literate in English, and requiring affected states and jurisdictions to offer certain types of bilingual assistance to voters. What devices did these Southern States use to limit voting by African Americans? Many of the Southern states enacted so-called poll taxes, charging people to vote. The southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia all passed poll tax laws. Monitors at the polls would apply these poll tax requirements selectively on the basis of race. States also passed literacy tests, requiring would-be voters to read various provisions of the state constitution. Some states also passed so-called "grandfather" clauses, that essentially limited the right to vote to individuals whose grandfathers were eligible to vote. Such clauses eliminated African Americans from voting, as their grandfathers were largely enslaved men who had no rights. When did the Court cast doubt on the use of literacy tests to vote? The Supreme Court cast doubt on the use of such literacy tests in upholding a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). The Court earlier had ruled in Lassiter v. North Carolina Board of Elections (1959) that a literacy test requirement did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. However, the United States Congress in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which essentially prohibited the use of such tests. However, New York had a state law that in effect had denied many persons from Puerto Rico the ability to vote. Writing for the Court, Justice William Brennan penned the following: "Here again, it is enough that we perceive a basis upon which Congress might predicate a judgment that the application of New York's English literacy requirement to deny the right to vote to a person with a sixth grade education in Puerto Rican schools in which the language of instruction was other than English constituted an invidious discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. When did women get the right to vote? Women finally received the right to vote in 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. But, it took decades and decades of organized struggle for this to happen. The women's rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, was a significant historical step on the road to slow progress. Suffragettes had to take to the street to protest in order to change public opinion on this subject. Excerpted from The Handy Civics Answer Book: How to Be a Good Citizen by David L. Hudson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
