The simple answer is no.

A vast majority of Americans believe that their right to vote is one of the most important rights in a democracy. Many Americans, however, might be surprised to know that there is no explicit, affirmative declaration of the right to vote in the U.S. Constitution. The Court has long deferred to state action with regard to voting rights—including the rights of states to disenfranchise specific groups of people—and specifically held in Bush v. Gore that individual citizens have no “federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

A look back into American history demonstrates that suffrage has been far from universal, and the expansion of voting rights and efforts against voting discrimination have been hard-fought battles. Disenfranchising someone because of their race was forbidden by the 15th Amendment. Fifty years later, women were enfranchised by the 19th Amendment. In 1971 the 26th Amendment provided that the voting rights of citizens ages 18 years and older could not be infringed by state or federal governments. Yet relying on these amendments alone to guarantee all Americans the constitutional right to vote is not enough.

The Court has been relatively hands off when it comes to voting cases, and, unlike the First Amendment, which affirmatively guarantees the right to free speech, these amendments protect citizens only in the negative. Rather than defining the rights of citizens to vote, the Court’s voting-related rulings have usually focused on what states cannot do regarding discrimination against certain classes, technical issues such as reapportionment and redistricting, and one person, one vote.

Further complicating things, the Supreme Court has sent mixed signals regarding the legal significance of voting. Fundamental rights are those without which “neither liberty nor justice would exist”—laws that may infringe on these rights are scrutinized by courts very closely. The Court has said that voting is a fundamental right; in practice, it has deferred to state-based voting laws (notwithstanding the Court’s recent decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona that invalidated a state voting law due to federal-law preemption rather than because of a fundamental-right analysis). This deference suggests that it is not applying the strictest level of review necessary to ensure that American voters are properly protected against burdensome state laws.

For example, the Court recently upheld an Indiana law that requires voters to show government-issued identification before they are allowed to cast their ballot. Instead of stating a coherent approach to election-law cases, the Court issued four different opinions that each described the proper application of voting law in different ways. University of Kentucky College of Law Professor Joshua Douglas notes, “Conspicuously missing from the Court’s decision was a discussion of when an election law implicates the fundamental right to vote.” This fractured ruling by the Court makes it hard to define the level of protections that individual voters are entitled to use against restrictive state laws. The result is legal deference to state voting laws.

So are the states handling this deference well?