Editing Politics of the United States (section)

===Development of voting===
In pre-colonial and post-revolutionary American times, voters  went to the polls and publicly stated which candidate they supported, rather than voting secretly, which was considered "cowardly" and "underhanded".<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/> Originally, state laws required voters to be property owners, but "by the time Andrew Jackson was elected President, in 1828, nearly all white men could vote".<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/>

Later in the 19th century, voting was done by written paper ballot. A broadened franchise where many voters were illiterate or misspelling disqualified a vote, led to the use of printed ballots. Each political party would create its own ballot—preprinted "party tickets"—give them to supporters, and who would publicly put the party's ballot into the voting box, or hand them to election judges through a window.<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/>  The tickets indicated a vote for all of that party's slate of candidates, preventing "ticket splitting".<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/> (As of 1859 "nowhere in the United States ... did election officials provide ballots", i.e. they all came from political parties.) In cities voters often had to make their way through a throng of partisans who  would try to prevent supporters of the opposing party from voting, a practice generally allowed unless it "clearly" appeared "that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness."<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008">{{cite magazine |last1=Lepore |first1=Jill |title=Rock, Paper, Scissors |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/rock-paper-scissors |access-date=September 26, 2022 |magazine=The New Yorker |date=October 6, 2008}}</ref> The practice was dangerous enough that in "the middle decades of the nineteenth century," several dozen (89) were killed in Election Day riots.<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/>

It was not until the late nineteenth century that states began to adopt the [[secret ballot|Australian secret-ballot method]] (despite fears it "would make any nation a nation of scoundrels"),<ref name="Lepore-NYer-2008"/>  and it eventually became the national standard. The secret ballot method ensured that the privacy of voters would be protected (hence government jobs could no longer be awarded to loyal voters), and each state would be responsible for creating one official ballot.

====Suffrage====
[[File:U.S. Vote for President as Population Share.png|thumb|upright=2|U.S. presidential election popular vote totals as a percentage of the total U.S. population grew from 1-2% in the first American elections to over 40% by the 21st century. Note the surge in 1828 ([[Jacksonian democracy|extension of suffrage to non-property-owning white men]]), the drop from 1890 to 1910 (when Southern states [[Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era|disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites]]), and another surge in 1920 ([[Women's suffrage in the United States|extension of suffrage to women]]).]]

Some key events of suffrage expansion are:

* 1792–1856: Abolition of property qualifications for white men were abolished.<ref name=NBER2005>{{cite web|author1=Stanley L. Engerman|author2=Kenneth L. Sokoloff|title=The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World|date=February 2005|url=http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/sokoloff-050406.pdf|pages=16, 35|quote=By 1840, only three states retained a property qualification, North Carolina (for some state-wide offices only), Rhode Island, and Virginia. In 1856 North Carolina was the last state to end the practice. Tax-paying qualifications were also gone in all but a few states by the Civil War, but they survived into the 20th century in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160310102314/http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/sokoloff-050406.pdf|archive-date=2016-03-10|access-date=2022-09-29}}</ref>
* 1868: Citizenship was guaranteed to all persons born or naturalized in the United States by the Fourteenth Amendment, although [[Jim Crow laws]] prevented most African Americans from voting. 
* 1920: Women are guaranteed the right to vote in all US states by the Nineteenth Amendment.
* 1964-66: Civil Rights laws and Supreme Court rulings eliminate tax payment and wealth requirements and protect voter registration and voting for racial minorities.
* 1971: Adults aged 18 through 20 are granted the right to vote by the Twenty-sixth Amendment.