Why has the expansion of suffrage been controversial?

because people were forced to move or face the wrath of the citizens of course those same rights were used to oppose those same changes. Africans were excluded form the franchise; even free blacks in the North were not allowed to vote before the civil war. the fifteenth Amendment prohibited the federal government and the states form denying the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." literacy test, poll tax, and the grandfather clause were used to keep blacks largely from disenfranchised.