Essay Sample about Voting Rights

As people, we take basically everything for granted. It just comes naturally. Every day, we see, have, and can do many things without realizing their true importance. I bet whenever you’ve voted for something, you've never truly processed all of the meaning behind your ballad. It’s much more than just voicing your opinion. Many fail to recognise and appreciate the suffering and protest it took for you to be able to fill in that little circle next to a candidate's name. The 15th, 19th, and 26th amendments allowed African Americans, women, and people 18 and over the right to vote. These are the 3 most important amendments. 

With the 15th amendment, which was passed in 1870, black people were finally guaranteed the right to vote.The 15th amendment not only gave black people the right to vote, it also made more job opportunities, housing, and rights available to African Americans. Since black people were able to vote now, there were more black representatives. They were able to voice their opinions and speak up for their rights and liberties. One of the most important things the 15th amendment did was allow for young African American people to see their own community in power. The whole African American community was heavily oppressed and discriminated against for so many years. When African Americans were finally able to see their own people have a voice and be represented it was empowering.

The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920. After women were granted the right to vote, there was a much wider variety of opinions. In order for the results of an election to be as accurate as possible, you need many opinions. The only way of achieving this is gathering more diverse groups of people. For example, a group of 5 white men are going to vote differently than a group of 20 people, 10 men and 10 women. This is because as humans, we only really have one perspective and our opinions differ because of that. Once women could vote, It allowed for progress to be made in the future. Now we have a female vice president. If women had never been granted the right to vote, who knows what our society could possibly look like. This illustrates how one right granted to one group of people can completely change the balance in power. First women were able to voice their opinions. After that, more women were able to be in positions of power. 

People 18 and older were guaranteed the right to vote when the 26th amendment was ratified in 1971. When the voting age was lowered by the 26th amendment, it allowed citizens to build their own future. The younger generation is going to be running things sooner than later. If we had never allowed young people to vote, it would have created this unnecessary control the older generations would have had over the younger ones.

Some would argue that the amendments which support voting rights aren’t the most important/ effective, because there are still things that stand in the way of voting and political progress for African Americans, women, and young people. Take the history of our presidents as an example. We still haven’t seen a female president. But just because as a society we are not fully evolved and perfected, doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate the progress we have made. We can still acknowledge the groundwork the past has laid down for us. If African Americans, women, and young people had never been granted the right to vote we would have never made any progress. There would be no hope for our generation and the ones to come. But by reminding ourselves that our past is nowhere near perfect, yet still appreciating what got us here, we can have a better future.