AP Photo\/Mark Humphrey<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIf you\u2019re looking for the right to vote, you won\u2019t find it in the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Bill of Rights recognizes the core rights of citizens in a democracy, including freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. It then recognizes several insurance policies against an abusive government that would attempt to limit these liberties: weapons; the privacy of houses and personal information; protections against false criminal prosecution or repressive civil trials; and limits on excessive punishments by the government.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the framers of the Constitution never mentioned a right to vote. They didn\u2019t forget \u2013 they intentionally left it out. To put it most simply, the founders didn\u2019t trust ordinary citizens to endorse the rights of others.<\/span><\/p>\nThey were creating a radical experiment in self-government paired with the protection of individual rights that are often resented by the majority. As a result, they did not lay out an inherent right to vote because they feared rule by the masses would mean the destruction of \u2013 not better protection for \u2013 all the other rights the Constitution and Bill of Rights uphold. Instead, they highlighted other core rights over the vote, creating a tension that remains today.<\/span><\/p>\nRelying on the elite to protect minority rights<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nMany of the rights the founders enumerated protect small groups from the power of the majority \u2013 for instance, those who would say or publish unpopular statements, or practice unpopular religions, or hold more property than others. James Madison, a principal architect of the U.S. Constitution and the drafter of the Bill of Rights, was an intellectual and landowner who saw the two as strongly linked.<\/span><\/p>\nAt the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison expressed the prevailing view that \u201cthe freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty,\u201d meaning only people who owned land debt-free, without mortgages, would be able to vote. The Constitution left voting rules to individual states, which had long-standing laws limiting the vote to those freeholders.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Madison trumpeted a benefit of the new system: the \u201ctotal exclusion of the people in their collective capacity.\u201d Even as the nation shifted toward broader inclusion in politics, Madison maintained his view that rights were fragile and ordinary people untrustworthy. In his 70s, he opposed the expansion of the franchise to nonlanded citizens when it was considered at Virginia\u2019s Constitutional Convention in 1829, emphasizing that \u201cthe great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the Minority.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThe founders believed that freedoms and rights would require the protection of an educated elite group of citizens, against an intolerant majority. They understood that protected rights and mass voting could be contradictory.<\/span><\/p>\nScholarship in political science backs up many of the founders\u2019 assessments. One of the field\u2019s clear findings is that elites support the protection of minority rights far more than ordinary citizens do. Research has also shown that ordinary Americans are remarkably ignorant of public policies and politicians, lacking even basic political knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\nIs there a right to vote?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nWhat Americans think of as the right to vote doesn\u2019t reside in the Constitution, but results from broad shifts in American public beliefs during the early 1800s. The new states that entered the union after the original 13 \u2013 beginning with Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee \u2013 did not limit voting to property owners. Many of the new state constitutions also explicitly recognized voting rights.<\/span><\/p>\nAs the nation grew, the idea of universal white male suffrage \u2013 championed by the commoner-President Andrew Jackson \u2013 became an article of popular faith, if not a constitutional right.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed that the right to vote would not be denied on account of race: If some white people could vote, so could similarly qualified nonwhite people. But that still didn\u2019t recognize a right to vote \u2013 only the right of equal treatment. Similarly, the 19th Amendment, now 100 years old, banned voting discrimination on the basis of sex, but did not recognize an inherent right to vote.<\/span><\/p>\nDebates about voting rights<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nToday, the country remains engaged in a long-running debate about what counts as voter suppression versus what are legitimate limits or regulations on voting \u2013 like requiring voters to provide identification, barring felons from voting or removing infrequent voters from the rolls.<\/span><\/p>\nThese disputes often invoke an incorrect assumption \u2013 that voting is a constitutional right protected from the nation\u2019s birth. The national debate over representation and rights is the product of a long-run movement toward mass voting paired with the longstanding fear of its results.<\/span><\/p>\nThe nation has evolved from being led by an elitist set of beliefs toward a much more universal and inclusive set of assumptions. But the founders\u2019 fears are still coming true: Levels of support for the rights of opposing parties or people of other religions are strikingly weak in the U.S. as well as around the world. Many Americans support their own rights to free speech but want to suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree. Americans may have come to believe in a universal vote, but that value does not come from the Constitution, which saw a different path to the protection of rights.<\/span><\/p>\nMorgan Marietta<\/strong><\/span>
\nAssociate Professor of Political Science, <\/span>
\nUniversity of Massachusetts Lowell<\/span><\/p>\n
\n* Published in print edition on 28 August 2020<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Morgan Marietta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":28430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25],"tags":[26492,26491,26489,26494,25844,26501,17521,24041,2242,9588,26490,26493],"class_list":["post-28429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-alexander-hamilton","tag-andrew-jackson","tag-bill-of-rights","tag-james-madison","tag-john-adams","tag-morgan-marietta","tag-the-conversation","tag-us-constitution","tag-voting","tag-voting-rights","tag-voting-rights-act","tag-voting-rights-act-of-1965"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/vote.jpg?fit=496%2C331&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-7ox","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/vote.jpg?resize=640%2C427&ssl=1\")
Voters in Nashville, Tennessee, faced long lines in March 2020.\u00a0