Magruder's American Government: 10. Government by the People, Sections 1–3

Suffrage means the right to vote.

Franchise is a synonym for the right to vote.

Today, the size of the American electorate—the potential voting population—is truly impressive.

Still, for nearly another century, African Americans were systematically barred from voting, and they remained the largest group of disenfranchised citizens, or citizens denied the right to vote, in the nation’s population.

A poll tax was a tax imposed by several States as a qualification for voting.

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing electoral district lines (the boundaries of the geographic area from which a candidate is elected to a public office) in order to limit the voting strength of a particular group or party.

An injunction is a court order that either compels or restrains the performance of some act by a private individual or public official.

Aliens, foreign-born residents who have not become citizens, are generally denied the right to vote in this country.

Nearly every State does prohibit transients, persons who plan to live in a State for only a short time, from gaining legal residence status there.

Registration is a procedure of voter identification intended to prevent fraudulent voting.

State law directs local election officials to review the lists of registered voters and to remove the names of those who are no longer eligible to vote. This process, known as purging, is usually done every two or four years.

Today, no State has a suffrage qualification based on voter literacy—a person’s ability to read and write.

As a general rule, the farther down the ballot an office is, the fewer the number of votes that will be cast for it. This phenomenon is sometimes called ballot fatigue. The expression suggests that many voters exhaust their patience and/or their knowledge as they work their way down the ballot.

Another large group of nonvoters is composed of people who have no sense of political efficacy. That is, they lack any feeling of influence or effectiveness in politics. They do not believe that they or their votes can have any real impact on what government does or does not do.

Political socialization involves all of the experiences and relationships that lead people to see the political world, and to act in it, as they do.

Another telling sign is the large number of voters who now call themselves independents. That term is regularly used to identify those people who have no party affiliation.