Question: What should I know about the history of voting?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. In the Constitution, as it was written, people only voted for the House of Representatives. Senators were chosen by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment permitted the people to vote for them in 1913. The President, still today, is chosen by the Electoral College, not directly by the people.

2. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, very often you had to own property in order to vote. The states gradually phased this out by the mid-nineteenth century.

3. Voting was not secret until the Progressive Era (c1900), when the Australian ballot (secret ballot) became prevalent.

 

 

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