What is the correct spelling of the right to vote?

The correct spelling of the word for the right to vote is Suffrage: s-u-f-f-r-a-g-e, with two f's after the initial s and the ending -age (silent e). The word comes from the Latin suffragium, meaning a vote or the right to vote, originally referring to a small piece of broken pottery used as a ballot in ancient Rome. The most common spelling errors are using one f (Sufrage), doubling the wrong consonant (Suffragge), or omitting the final e (Suffrag).

One memory aid: SUFF-rage, with the doubled f at the start and -rage at the end (the word is unrelated in meaning to anger but the visual cue helps). On the USCIS writing test sentences containing suffrage may include "Women won suffrage in 1920" or "Suffrage is the right to vote."

In U.S. constitutional history the expansion of suffrage from property-holding white men in the early republic to virtually all adult citizens today is one of the central themes. Several constitutional amendments have expanded the franchise: the Fifteenth (1870, race), the Nineteenth (1920, sex), the Twenty-Third (1961, residents of Washington, D.C.), the Twenty-Fourth (1964, abolishing poll taxes in federal elections), and the Twenty-Sixth (1971, lowering the voting age to 18). The Voting Rights Act of 1965 added enforcement mechanisms to protect voters from discriminatory practices such as literacy tests.

The civics test asks about the amendments that protect voting rights and about the responsibilities of citizens to vote. The suffrage movement led by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul lasted seventy-two years from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 to the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920.