This is an I-Heart podcast.

What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi.

Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why?

Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies.

From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.

What difference at this point does it make?

Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

...or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with our American stories.

And here to tell another great American story is the Jack Miller Center's editorial officer and historian Elliot Drago. This is the story of what

happened shortly after the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution,

prohibiting a citizen's right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Let's take a listen.

Americans today understand the saying,

Every vote matters.

Whether affected by hanging chads, butterfly ballots, or razor-thin vote counts,

every vote matters because it allows one to exercise citizenship.

But what did every vote matters, voting, and citizenship mean in the early history of the United States? Unlike today's federal laws, which are designed to protect voters and voting rights,

in past times, individual states determined who could vote,, in a sense, determined who was a citizen.

During the early republic, many states legislated voting rights and citizenship as the purview of white property-owning men.

By the 1830s, however, as the United States expanded its territory and witnessed the arrival of millions of immigrants and the

creation of a new two-party system, most states enfranchised all white men. Women and black

Americans were generally written out of state voting rights legislation, leading to a suffrage

...