Constitution was not originally drafted to be a broadly democratic document, in the sense of permitting the largest number of people to vote. Indeed the original text of the Constitution contains a large number of seemingly anti-democratic provisions, many of which were overturned by subsequent amendment. These "anti-democratic" elements included the barring of slaves from the franchise, the refusal to consider the notion that women might vote, and various other elements -- like the refusal to allow the electorate to vote directly on the election of Senators (who were elected by state legislatures) or President (who was elected by the Electoral College) -- that indicate that the original intent of the Constitution was not to have the broadest possible franchise. When the Constitution was ratified, only males who owned property and paid taxes could vote. However, numerous changes since 1787 have expanded the franchise in various ways.
The first movement was "Jacksonian democracy," the expansion of voting rights at least among white men under the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the early nineteenth century -- this largely removed property restrictions, thus ensuring that white men who were poor or recent immigrants would be able to vote. In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. Civil War would result in larger...
The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War, states that voting rights cannot be restricted or denied based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" -- meaning that the franchise was ultimately extended to former slaves. In practice, however, the former slave states would find various ways to restrict voting opportunity (through various "Jim Crow" type laws, which would create artificial obstacles on the local level to prevent ex-slaves from voting) for African-Americans until the latter half of the twentieth century. This racial bias would require certain other remedies including another Constitutional Amendment outlawing poll taxes (the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964); various legislative remedies for racial minorities to guarantee their rights all too often trampled on by state governments in the south (with the Voting Rights Act); and Supreme Court decisions (which would remove various tactics designed to prevent minorities from voting, like the "grandfather clause," the "white primary," or literacy tests).
Numerically speaking, perhaps the largest single extension of the franchise came with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which declared that voting could not be denied "on account…
