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Christina Fabrizi
Mrs. Guffey
ELA 1: Hour 2 29 January 2015 The Importance of Voting
In order to understand the consequentiality of voting we require to examine some of the history. There are two amendments that address voting rights for those who aforetime could not vote, the 15th Amendment (1870) and the 19th Amendment (1920). The 15th Amendment gave
African­Americans suffrage and the 19th provided suffrage rights to women. Voting is a paramount right; this is evident by the number of people who have fought long and hard for this right, those who were gainsaid suffrage now have a higher percentage in voting(Statistics), and not voting “denies a person one of the key implements of having a say in a democracy”(Frantzich). Statistics show that those who were negated the right of suffrage, now have a higher percentage in voting and those eligible to vote are not voting. For example, the male percentage in 2012 was 69.1% compared to women which had a percentage of 72.8%(Statistics). This shows that having others than only white males, like before 1870 when colored men could vote(Tennant
1), have a more astronomically immense impact on the federal regimes. The number of eligible voters, those registered to vote, and those who participate in voting is profoundly drastic. The total number of eligible voter is 206,072,000 and the amount of Americans who participated in voting is 131, 144,000(Statistics).That is 74 million over half and people may say that that is not

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a lot over the eligible number of voters, but it’s genuinely an immense number. Think of all those people, if they would have voted then their votes could have transmuted the outcome of the elections. But more than ,think of all the people who contributed to the voting that did not have suffrage in 1869, like African­Americans. African­Americans contributed 69.7% of election votes in 2012(Statistics) but they had a long battle throughout history to have suffrage. African­Americans could not vote until 1870 when the 15th Amendment was passed(Tennant 1). “This amendment was intended to give liberated slaves the same privileges offered to the white majority in the U.S.”(Tennant 1) But, there was still discrimination towards the African­Americans making the “Jim Crow Laws”(We the People). The “Jim Crow Laws” were racial segregation laws enacted after the 15th amendment was ratified. They consisted of a literacy test, a poll tax, and the grandfather clause.
The grandfather clause was a clause passed by the south that verbally expressed the citizens were sanctioned to vote only if there grandfather could vote(We the People).This made it hard for
African­Americans to vote because a plethora of the African­Americans grandfather’s had been slaves so they could not vote engendering a chain of non­eligible voters. But, this ceased after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. But, this act was not ratified until several amendments had been passed like the 19th amendment.
Women have worked tirelessly for generations to gain suffrage.They gained this right