Vote, dammit

Courtesy of Steve Goddard's History Wire:

Don't Take Your Vote For Granted

In a presidential year in which only about half those eligible to vote will in fact do so, it's well to keep in mind that for many eligible voters -- among them women, African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans and the poor -- the path to the voting booth was strewn with obstacles that they first had to surmount.

University of Houston History Prof. Steven Mintz examines the history of voting rights in this election season on [here]:

"The story of how voting rights became virtually universal is not a story of unbroken progress. Rather, it is, as historian Alexander Keyssar has persuasively argued, a story of struggle. There have been periods in which voting rights have contracted and periods in which they have expanded. The United States was the first nation to expand the vote to virtually all white men, but it has also undergone periods in which voting rights were restricted, and it was one of the last Western nations to guarantee the vote to all citizens."