While working on my bachelor’s degree in global studies a few
years ago, I spent countless hours studying governments around the
world. I even went so far as to travel to Afghanistan to do
research for my Senior Capstone project. The main focus in my
research was on democracy and why it seems to fail in so many
countries and yet thrives in the United States.
While working on my bachelor’s degree in global studies a few years ago, I spent countless hours studying governments around the world. I even went so far as to travel to Afghanistan to do research for my Senior Capstone project. The main focus in my research was on democracy and why it seems to fail in so many countries and yet thrives in the United States.
The answer was relatively simple – suffrage. Americans are unique in that their right to vote is guaranteed by the Constitution and, in most cases, free of voter fraud. Those countries that are in disarray have a common link – leaders that think they know what’s best for the people and then deprive citizens from the opportunity to vote.
With the controversy over Measure G, or as I like to call it, “The Godfather Initiative,” hitting San Benito County, I thought many of you would be interested in reading an excerpt from a paper I wrote while I was in college on the history of suffrage in the United States.
Maybe with a little luck, our county supervisors and the out-of-town environmental group fighting to take away our voting rights will read the following excerpt and understand that America is a nation built on suffrage rights.
History of Voter Participation
“Unbeknownst to many voters today, suffrage was not always a right to all men and women in the United States of America. If one were to ask the average American citizen the question, “Have all Americans always had the right to vote?” by far the great majority of those asked would respond with a yes answer.
To understand the many problems voters are facing today, one has to look back through the history of American voting rights. Upon reviewing the rights of voters throughout the history of the United States, one can quickly see a pattern of disenfranchisement among several different groups. These patterns of depriving people the right to vote were not simple oversights, but a way to keep the poor, poor. With no voting rights, how could one possibly change the destiny of one’s future?
Those of the wealthier classes understood that the best way to ensure their own prosperity for the future was to keep the majority of people away from the legislative process. These techniques have been used since the founding of the United States and continue to be applied today.
During the formation of the Constitution, many of the original architects grappled with how best to deal with the problem of allowing citizens to vote. Many of these new states quickly ceased the opportunity to decide who had the right to vote. Most states felt only white males, who owned property and were over the age of 21, were capable of voting with intelligence.
This time period in America’s history is where many laws were designed to separate the rich from the poor through legal means. For the past 200 years, poor disadvantaged men and women of all colors have had to pay a high price for the early failures and indecision’s of the framers of the Constitution.
The first group to win the right to vote were black males. This right did not come about because of marches or protests, but mainly as a way for influential people from the North to gain more economic power in the South after the Civil War. Even with the passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave black males the right to vote, most blacks were still not allowed to vote. States simply devised tactics to keep black males from the polls. One of the ways to keep blacks from voting was the poll tax. Many other tactics were also implemented such as literacy tests and grandfather clauses.
One of the last groups to gain suffrage rights was women. Ironically, it was women who fought hardest for the right to vote, but had to wait the longest to get the right to vote. It wasn’t until 1920 that women across the United States finally won the battle of suffrage. Almost 150 years since the beginning of a nation that promised “rights for all,” women finally had the right to choose who would best represent them.
For close to 200 years, the lack of courage by the original framers of the Constitution left millions of Americans disenfranchised and unable to stop legislation designed to benefit the very elite of society at the cost of the working class. The wealthy and privileged have not given up on controlling the political system through other means.”
As SBC residents struggle to understand what Measure G is about and if it is really needed, those powerful and privileged supervisors along with the out of town environmentalists involved in its creation are doing everything possible to keep SBC residents from exercising their right to vote on the measure.
It’s irrelevant whether you’re for or against Measure G. What’s important is that as an American, no one should have the power to deprive you of your right to vote!
Ignacio Velazquez can be reached at ig***************@cs***.edu
