What amendments protect voting rights?

Four constitutional amendments specifically protect voting rights in the United States: the Fifteenth, the Nineteenth, the Twenty-Fourth, and the Twenty-Sixth. Each amendment removed a particular barrier to participation in elections, expanding the American electorate over more than a century.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, was the third Reconstruction Amendment after the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection. It declares that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Although southern states evaded the amendment for nearly a century through poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and outright violence, federal enforcement under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally gave the amendment practical effect.

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, declares that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. The amendment culminated a women's suffrage movement that had begun at Seneca Falls in 1848 with leaders including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Paul. Tennessee provided the decisive thirty-sixth ratification when state representative Harry Burn changed his vote at his mother's urging.

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified on January 23, 1964, prohibits poll taxes in federal elections. It declares that the right of citizens to vote in any primary or other election for President, Vice President, electors, Senator, or Representative shall not be denied or abridged by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax. Two years later Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) extended the ban to state and local elections.

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified on July 1, 1971, set the voting age at eighteen. It declares that the right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. The amendment passed Congress and was ratified in just one hundred days during the Vietnam War, when the slogan old enough to fight, old enough to vote captured the public mood.

Together these four amendments transformed voting in America from a privilege restricted to white male property owners into a near-universal right of adult citizens. Naturalization candidates often need to recognize all four as voting-rights amendments.