• Chapter 17: Elections and Voting

Electing the President

• To be elected president, a candidate must win 270 of the 538 available electoral votes—a simple majority.

• The electoral vote is equal to the number of representatives and senators from all the states, plus 3 votes from the District of Columbia.

• Each state’s electoral vote equals the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress.

Financing Campaigns

• Direct donations to candidates or parties also come from political action committees, or PACs.

• PACs are established by interest groups to raise money to support candidates or parties.

Campaign Spending

• Expanding the Right to Vote:

1. Women’s Suffrage

2. African-American Suffrage

3. Voting Age

Woman Suffrage

• By 1914, women had won the right to vote in 11 states.

• Not until after World War I, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, was woman suffrage put into effect nationwide.

African American Suffrage

• Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870 and gave African-American males the right to vote.

• The grandfather clause was incorporated in the constitutions of some Southern states and provided that only voters whose grandfathers had voted before 1867 were eligible to vote without paying a certain tax or passing a literacy test.

African American Suffrage (cont.)

• Some southern states used the literacy tests to keep African Americans from the polls.

• Another device that was designed to discourage African American suffrage was a poll tax—an amount of money that a citizen had to pay before he or she could vote.

African American Suffrage (cont.)

• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the federal government to register voters in any district where less than 50 percent of African American adults were on the voting lists.

Twenty-sixth Amendment

• During the Vietnam War a movement began to lower the voting age from 21 to 18.

• The Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Profile of Regular Voters

• Citizens who vote regularly have certain positive attitudes toward government and citizenship.

• The more education a citizen has, the more likely it is that he or she will vote.

• Middle-aged citizens have the highest voting turnout of all age groups.

• Voter regularity also increases with income.

Profile of Nonvoters

• Some citizens do not vote because they do not meet state voting requirements.

• Complicated registration procedures and residency requirements can also be a barrier to voting.