Start with the sentence that remade the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, 1868: everyone born in this country is a citizen of it, and no state may deny any person the equal protection of the laws. You met it in Movement Five as the hinge of the Second Founding. It is also the legal floor under nearly every rights case since — schools, marriage, policing — all of them argue from that one clause.
Then the ballot, which took two centuries to widen, one fight at a time. At the founding, most states allowed only white men with property to vote. By the 1830s the property rule fell — for white men. The Fifteenth Amendment, 1870, said the vote cannot be denied for race — and was then gutted for ninety years by poll taxes, rigged “literacy” tests, and terror. The Nineteenth, 1920, brought women in after seventy years of organizing. The Twenty-Fourth, 1964, killed the poll tax. The Voting Rights Act, 1965, finally enforced the promise of 1870. The Twenty-Sixth, 1971, added eighteen-year-olds, carried by a Vietnam-era argument no one could answer: old enough to be drafted, old enough to vote.
Now the mechanics, because mechanics decide elections. You must register, under your state’s rules and deadlines — remember from Question Three that states run elections. You vote in districts, and every ten years, after the census counts the country, the district lines are redrawn, usually by state politicians. Drawing the lines to guarantee your side wins has a name — gerrymandering, after Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose 1812 district was drawn so strangely it was cartooned as a salamander — and both parties do it wherever they hold the pen. And the presidency is won not by the national vote total but through the Electoral College: each state appoints electors, almost all winner-take-all, which is how, twice already this century, the candidate with fewer votes nationwide became president.
Which brings this page to its present tense. Americans are in a running argument about the voting rules themselves: identification requirements, mail ballots, early-voting days, how the rolls of registered voters are cleaned. One side argues such rules protect the security of the vote; the other argues they narrow access to it; each suspects the other of writing rules designed to win. You don’t need this page to referee that argument. You need it to recognize what the argument is: the newest chapter of the oldest fight in this section — who counts, and on what terms.
One more thing the history earns. Every sentence in the second paragraph was somebody’s life work. Nobody in power woke up generous. The ballot widened because people organized until excluding them cost more than including them — and it has narrowed, in other eras, when the watching stopped.