Voting and Elections Quotes

Elections are how a representative democracy functions. Voting selects who the representatives will be. The right to vote is a basic civil right in a democratic republic. Who has the right to vote has changed over time, and challenging barriers to voting is a common form of civil rights activism.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal … is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

[M]en are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government.

July does not a November election make.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up.

When it’s easier to buy a cache of assault weapons than cast a vote — expect massacres to be the norm

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.

If American women increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.

The Voting Rights Act was, and still is, vitally important to the future of democracy in the United States.

Particularly in the South, efforts continue to be made to deny blacks access to the polls, even where blacks constitute the majority of the voters.

Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared [to register to vote] – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody, rather than for somebody.

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

The plan is to invest permanently the powers of government in the hands of the people who ought to have them — the white people.

I view my role now as providing more of a macro-level skepticism, rather than saying this poll is good or this poll is evil.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

I don’t want everybody to vote. Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Those who stay away from the election think that one vote will do no good: ‘Tis but one step more to think one vote will do no harm.

We have to act now to take steps so that the next time there is a razor-thin election — and there will be one, sooner or later — our civil society is strong enough to withstand foreign and domestic efforts to tear it apart.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens, but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people — women as well as men.

There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

Suffrage is the pivotal right.