Right to Vote.

Get out there and vote today...some people literally would DIE for this right that we so quickly take for granted!!

VOTE...VOTE ..VOTE and exercise this right and this liberty because YOUR VOTE COUNTS!

It has been such a long process to get to this place where everyone in this country has the right to vote...where each vote is counted as a single vote...where everyone can vote regardless of gender, race, wealth, class, etc.

In honor of election day, I did a bit of research on the history of the right to vote and these are some of the things I came up with!

"When the polls open on Election Day, every citizen over the age of 18 will be able to cast a vote. It is a right we take for granted, one that defines our nation as a democracy. But universal suffrage — letting everyone vote — did not appear overnight with the ratification of our Constitution. Two hundred years ago, you had to be white, male, and wealthy in order to vote."

"Suffrage is the right to vote, and modern democracies, including the United States, extend that right to almost all responsible adult citizens, a condition known as universal suffrage. Indeed, "one person, one vote" is seen as a hallmark of representative democracy. It was not always so, however. In the United States two groups in particular, African Americans and women, were long excluded from the franchise, and their struggles to achieve the right to vote were long and hard fought. The U.S. Constitution made no statement concerning the right to vote, leaving that determination to the states. And at the time the Constitution was written, not only was suffrage restricted to white males, but it was further limited by religious, property, and taxpaying qualifications. By the time of the Civil War the principle of unrestricted white male suffrage was established, and it was mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In theory, African American men achieved suffrage with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, but in fact some states threw up barriers to black voting that persisted into the 1960s. American women did not win their struggle for suffrage until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, but unlike African Americans, they did not then have to continue the fight against state attempts to circumvent the law. A final extension of suffrage took place in 1971 when the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18."

And then after reading all of this, I really started thinking about women's right to vote in other countries...and while doing some more research I fell across this timeline for Women Suffrage internationally. The timeline merely gives a TASTE of all the women in the world, and just think about how many women do not have the right to vote. So to all those women out there ...don't take this liberty for granted and GET OUT THERE AND VOTE on behalf of those women who can't.