Voting Rights Milestones in America: A Timeline

Since America’s founding days, when voting was limited to white male property owners, to the transformative Voting Rights Act of 1965, to sweeping voting process reform introduced in the early 2000s, the right to vote in U.S. elections has seen massive change.

The original Constitution left voting rights to the states for a range of reasons, including a compromise over slavery and the fact that the concept of setting up a representative democracy was new, says David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University and the University of Minnesota School of Law.