What word means the right to vote?

The word that means the right to vote, on the USCIS reading vocabulary list, is Suffrage. Suffrage is the right of citizens to vote in elections for public office, and the expansion of suffrage from a narrow group of property-holding white men to virtually all adult citizens is one of the central stories of American constitutional history.

The original Constitution left the power to set voting qualifications largely to the states, and in the early republic most states limited the franchise by race, sex, and property ownership. Several constitutional amendments have since expanded suffrage. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, provides that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920 after a 72-year campaign by suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul, prohibits denial of the vote on account of sex.

The Twenty-Third Amendment, ratified in 1961, gave residents of Washington, D.C., presidential electors. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, abolished the poll tax in federal elections, addressing a tax that had been used to disenfranchise Black voters in the South. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Federal statutes including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 added enforcement mechanisms to protect voters from discriminatory state laws and practices such as literacy tests, which the Act suspended. To register and vote in federal elections in the United States today a person must be a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old on or before election day, and meet state residency requirements. On the reading test Suffrage may appear in sentences about voting rights or constitutional amendments.