Voting rights took centuries to win. Exercise them today | Opinion
About a kilometer from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, a bare limestone slope called Pnyx Hill faces the city below. Starting in the fifth century B.C., Athenians climbed that hill by the thousands to speak, argue and vote. The space was open to the sky. There were no walls, no gates, no ticket of admission beyond citizenship itself. For two hundred years, the assembly that met there acted on a radical idea: ordinary people can govern themselves.
The experiment was deeply flawed. Citizenship belonged only to free men over age 18. Women, enslaved people and foreign residents — the majority of the population — were shut out entirely. But the idea that took root on Pnyx Hill outlasted Athens itself. The principle that a legitimate government requires the consent and participation of its people became one of the most powerful and most contested claims in history, including in our own country.
America’s founders wrote that idea into the Constitution. They also wrote exclusion into it. The document that declared “We the People” counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of congressional representation, giving slaveholding states more power while granting enslaved people none. The history of American democracy has been the story of who works to widen that circle and who fights to keep it closed.
When the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, it promised that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race. For a brief period, Black men across the South voted, held office and shaped the laws that governed their communities. Then the backlash came. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandfather clauses. Violence. By the turn of the 20th century, Black citizens in former Confederate states had been effectively stripped of their constitutional right to vote. The promise survived on paper. In practice, it was erased for nearly a century.
It took another movement to restore it. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Under Section 5, states and counties with histories of racial discrimination had to submit any proposed changes to their election rules for federal approval before those changes could take effect. The provision was called preclearance, and it worked. In Mississippi, Black voter registration rose from less than seven percent to nearly sixty percent within a few years. In 1967, Robert Clark won a seat in the Mississippi state legislature — the first Black legislator in that state since Reconstruction. Across the South, Black communities that had been locked out of self-governance for generations began choosing their own representatives and shaping the policies that touched their daily lives.
For nearly fifty years, preclearance served as a checkpoint against the return of discriminatory voting laws. Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court struck it down. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Court ruled that the formula determining which jurisdictions required federal oversight was outdated. The preclearance requirement itself was not declared unconstitutional, but without the formula, it became unenforceable. Within hours, Texas announced it would implement a voter identification law that had previously been blocked as racially discriminatory. Among its provisions: the law accepted concealed handgun permits but not student IDs. An estimated 600,000 registered voters lacked the newly required documents. Weeks later, North Carolina passed a sweeping bill that curtailed early voting, eliminated same-day registration, and imposed strict new photo ID requirements — a law that a federal appeals court later struck down for targeting Black voters.
The restrictions were not the only tool. In the years that followed, state legislatures also redrew electoral maps to dilute the voting power of communities of color, concentrating minority voters into as few districts as possible or splitting them across many. Even where the right to vote survived, representation did not follow.
Democratic governments do not guarantee justice. But democracy creates the conditions under which justice can be pursued. When people can choose their representatives, they gain a mechanism — imperfect, slow, sometimes maddeningly inadequate — for holding power accountable. When that mechanism is weakened, the people with the least power lose the most. That is what makes voting a human right. Without the ballot, every other right becomes harder to defend.
Democracy requires people who show up. Idaho’s primary election is on May 19. If you have not yet registered, you can do so at your polling location on election day. If you have, check your polling location as assignments sometimes change. Offer someone a ride to the polls. Primary elections historically have the lowest turnout and are often decided by a handful of votes. The people who show up on election day will determine which candidates appear on the November ballot — and which voices represent your community for years to come.
Pnyx Hill still stands in Athens. The assembly is long gone, but the slope remains: open, weathered, ordinary. What made it extraordinary was never the stone. It was the people who climbed it to do the work of governing together. Voting is that climb. The outcome is never guaranteed. But showing up is itself an act of muscular hope — a vote not just for a candidate but for the belief that self-governance is worth the effort.
Jess Westhoff serves as the education director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. Christina Bruce-Bennion is the executive director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights.