Voting Regulations

Introduction

Voting is a political right that all adults should exercise, but it does not always bring about a situation in which people can govern their own lives. Voting is therefore a necessary but not sufficient part of democracy. Although all politics requires an element of consensus, the notion that people should consciously and specifically register their opinion arises with the liberal tradition. Liberalism argues that everyone is an individual and, being an individual, such a person should consent to government. Of course the right to vote was in practice restricted to certain categories of people well into the twentieth century, since liberals took the view historically that only individuals with property and rationality should vote.

This in practice meant not only men, but men with property and the “right” ethnicity and religion. Democracy, construed as the exercise of universal suffrage, was feared by liberals until the twentieth century on the grounds that the poor, the “dependent,” the female, and those of the “wrong” religion would not be able to vote sensibly and responsibly.

In colonial New Jersey, the franchise was generally limited to free white males who were property owners, reflecting the society's values and prejudices. The new state's 1776 constitution gave the vote to "all inhabitants" of full age who met a property and residence requirement. This broad language created opportunities for some women and blacks to vote, but the loophole was closed by statute in 1807. The 1844 constitution removed the property requirement. Legal discrimination against black voters was eliminated in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and against women by the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Although the opportunity to vote is one of the basic rights afforded to American citizens, the system by which voting takes place remains an evolving process. Today, most Americans vote with some type of paper ballot. Typically, a card or a sheet of paper has been used for voting since the first votes that were held in ancient Rome. The term ballot, however, derives from the Italian word to describe the small balls or marbles that Roman soldiers threw into the helmets that they used as ballot boxes (Jessee, pp. 59-81).

Today, each local community chooses and finances its method for counting and collecting votes. Because new equipment is costly, changes in the voting process and voting technology are typically spurred by difficulties. The entire world watched in the election of 2000 as the American system of voting—the foundation of a democracy—failed to conclusively choose a President. Since then, many communities around the U.S. have taken steps to prevent further difficulties.

Although new technologies may improve certain aspects of voting, they are not perfect. In fact, some critics argue that many electronic techniques compromise the security of ballots. History suggests that glitches are also part of the democratic system.

Discussion

During the colonial era and in the early United States, voting was seen as a privilege, not a right. Leaders assumed that voters should be men who were not economically dependent on ...