American Indian Culture and Research Journal

American political history regularly has been punctuated by bitter struggles over the right to vote. Those who already have the franchise usually have been reluctant to extend it to others, especially when those others are different somehow from the dominant culture: a different race, or a different gender, or a different economic class. Moreover, voting rights claims reach to the core of the political order, often engendering conflicts whose resolution is possible only through extraordinary political actions like amending the Constitution. Indeed, since 1870, six of the twelve amendments to the federal Constitution have addressed voting issues. Why have voting rights conflicts so often been characterized by passionate rhetoric and even violence? Clearly, the stakes for both those advocating and those opposing an expansion of the suffrage have been high. For those seeking to obtain the right to vote there has been a common belief that, in the words of the Supreme Court, "the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights." Liberal democratic theory assumes that with the right to vote comes representation in government and, consequently, the ability to protect oneself and one's people against the abuses of power that majorities often evince. Conversely, any group that can attain effective control of elections and the instruments of government will have a nearly unfettered opportunity to insulate its interests and traditional privileges against the claims of newcomers. For example, many southern whites opposed Black voting rights in part because change would "unbalance local political alignments and would result in a massive redistribution of economic and political resources to the black community."