5.1 - Voting Rights and Models of Voting Behavior

Constitutional Amendments Expanding Political Participation

• 14th Amendment (1868): grants citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the U.S., originally aimed at formerly enslaved people.

• 15th Amendment (1870): bans race as a barrier to voting, though states still blocked Black voters until the mid-1960s through literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and intimidation.

• 17th Amendment (1913): established direct election of senators, shifting power from state legislatures to the people.

• 19th Amendment (1920): granted women's suffrage, banning sex as a voting barrier.

• 24th Amendment (1964): banned poll taxes in federal elections, a structural barrier that had mainly blocked Black voters. (In 1966, the Supreme Court struck down poll taxes in state elections too.) Combined with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this led to a big jump in Black voter turnout.

• 26th Amendment (1971): lowered the voting age to 18 nationwide, based on the reasoning that if you're old enough to be drafted, you're old enough to vote.

Voting Rights Laws

• Voting Rights Act of 1965: the most important voting rights law. It suspended literacy tests in places with a history of discrimination (a nationwide ban came in 1970), sent federal examiners to register Black voters, and made those places get federal approval before changing any voting rules (called preclearance). Black voter registration in the South rose sharply within a few years.
• In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula that decided which places needed preclearance, so preclearance is no longer in use. The rest of the law, including its nationwide ban on voting rules that discriminate by race, still applies.

• National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ("Motor Voter"): lets people register to vote when they get or renew a driver's license, which made registering much easier.

• Help America Vote Act of 2002: passed after the disputed 2000 election. It gave states money to replace old voting machines, created provisional ballots for voters whose eligibility is in question, and required each state to keep one statewide list of registered voters.

Required Court Cases on Voting and Districts

• Baker v. Carr (1962): the Court ruled 6-2 that federal courts can hear redistricting cases, because badly unequal districts can violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Redistricting isn't just a "political question" left to legislatures.
• Why it matters here: it led to the "one person, one vote" rule, so districts must have roughly equal populations and every vote carries about the same weight. It shows courts protecting political participation when legislatures won't fix the problem themselves.

• Shaw v. Reno (1993): in a 5-4 decision about a North Carolina district drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the Court ruled that a district drawn with race as the only factor can be challenged under the Equal Protection Clause and faces strict scrutiny.
• Why it matters here: it shows the tension between two goals, boosting minority representation (the Voting Rights Act) and treating every voter the same regardless of race (the 14th Amendment). Race can be one factor in drawing districts, but not the only one.

• Comparing them: both cases use the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to limit how states draw districts. Baker is about population (each vote should count equally), while Shaw is about race (a district can't be drawn on race alone). The facts of both are in Topic 2.3 and on the case pages.

Models of Voting Behavior

• Rational Choice Voting: voting based on personal self-interest, like a parent voting for a candidate who promises childcare subsidies.

• Retrospective Voting: voting based on how well someone currently in office has performed, deciding whether they've earned another term.
• Example: a voter who feels the economy got worse over the last four years votes against the president's party.

• Prospective Voting: voting based on who you think will handle future issues better, which requires more political knowledge.
• Example: a voter compares the candidates' plans for the economy and picks the one they expect to do better over the next four years, no matter how the current officeholder did.

• Straight-Ticket Voting: voting for every candidate from the same party down the ballot, requiring minimal political knowledge.
• The opposite is split-ticket voting: picking candidates from different parties on the same ballot. Straight-ticket voting has grown as the parties have become more polarized. In 2016, for the first time, every state with a Senate race elected a senator from the same party that won its presidential vote.

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