Topic 5.1 Notes – Voting Rights and Models of Voting Behavior

Voting Rights and the Expansion of Suffrage

Suffrage or franchise means the right to vote. Enfranchisement means gaining that right. Disenfranchisement means losing it or being blocked from using it.

The starting point matters. The original Constitution did not create universal suffrage. States set most voter qualifications, and in practice voting was mostly limited to white men, often with property or taxpaying rules attached.

That helps explain the pattern you see later. Voting rights grew piece by piece, mostly through amendments that either:

• banned a specific reason for excluding people from voting, or
• made government offices more directly accountable to voters

This timeline gives you the big picture before you move into the specific amendments and laws.

Timeline of voting rights expansion in the United States

One distinction AP loves is this: legal access to vote is different from actual turnout. Someone can have the right to vote and still not register, not show up, or face obstacles that lower participation.

The Constitutional Protections for Voting Rights

These amendments do different jobs. Some expand who can vote. Some remove barriers. One changes how senators are selected.

Fourteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment made all people born or naturalized in the U.S. citizens, including formerly enslaved people. It also includes due process and equal protection, which later became major tools in voting-rights cases.

The key nuance is that citizenship is not the same thing as suffrage. The amendment created a foundation, but it did not by itself give everyone the vote.

Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment says voting rights cannot be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. You’ll usually see this summarized as giving African American men the right to vote.

In practice, Southern states got around it with:

• literacy tests
• poll taxes
• grandfather clauses
• white primaries
• intimidation and violence

That gap between the law on paper and reality is one of the biggest ideas in this topic.

Seventeenth Amendment

The Seventeenth Amendment changed senators from being chosen by state legislatures to being chosen by direct vote of the people.

This expanded democracy by making senators answer to voters. The common mistake is saying it changed voter eligibility. Its main effect was changing how senators were selected.

Nineteenth Amendment

The Nineteenth Amendment banned denying the vote on account of sex. It granted women the right to vote nationwide.

Important nuance: many women, especially Black women in the South, still faced racial barriers after 1920.

Twenty-Fourth Amendment

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections. A poll tax meant paying money as a condition of voting, so it hurt poor voters and disproportionately harmed Black voters.

In Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966), the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down poll taxes in state elections too.

Twenty-Sixth Amendment

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. The Vietnam-era slogan was “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.”

The Voting Rights Act and Why Enforcement Matters

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enforced the Fifteenth Amendment. It banned racial discrimination in voting nationwide, targeted literacy tests and similar devices, and required some places with histories of discrimination to get federal approval, called preclearance, before changing voting rules.

This is the core takeaway. Constitutional rights alone did not end disenfranchisement. Federal law gave the government tools to enforce those rights against state and local suppression.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula used to decide which jurisdictions needed preclearance. It did not strike down the whole Voting Rights Act. Preclearance became mostly unusable unless Congress creates a new formula.

Models of Voting Behavior

Once people have access to the ballot, these models explain how they choose. One scenario can fit more than one model, so go by what the question emphasizes.

• Rational-choice voting means voting for the option you think best serves your interests, such as taxes, safety, values, or community needs.
• Retrospective voting means looking backward and judging the recent performance of the incumbent or party in power. Think economy, war, scandal, inflation, crisis response.
• Prospective voting means looking forward and choosing based on promises, policy plans, ideology, or expected future results.
• Straight-ticket voting means choosing all candidates from one party across the ballot. In the ballot shown here, focus on the straight-party section on the left.

Straight-party section of a ballot

How to Tell the Models Apart Fast

Use the clue words in the scenario.