at places of registration and at elections with authority to challenge any person proposing to register or vote unlawfully, to witness the counting of votes, and to identify by their signatures the registration of voters and election tally sheets. Beginning with the Tillman Act of 1907, Congress has imposed a growing number of restrictions on elections and campaign financing. The most significant piece of legislation has been the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. It was this legislation that was at issue in the Supreme Court's seminal decision, Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which, in the face of a First Amendment challenge, set the ground rules for campaign finance legislation, generally disallowing restrictions on expenditures by candidates, but permitting restrictions on contributions by individuals and corporations. In addition to statutory constraints, Congress and the States have altered the electoral process through amending the Constitution (first in the above mentioned Fifteenth Amendment). The Seventeenth Amendment altered the manner of conducting the elections of senators; establishing that they are to be elected by the people of the states. Also, the Nineteenth Amendment prohibits any U.S. citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex; the Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax; and the Twenty-sixth Amendment prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to U.S. citizens who are at least eighteen years old. Clause 2: Sessions of Congress Clause 2 fixes an annual date upon which Congress must meet. By doing so, the Constitution empowers Congress to meet, whether or not the president called it into session. Article II, Section 3 does grant the president limited authority to convene and adjourn both Houses (or either of them) and mandates that it will meet at least once in a year to enact legislation on behalf of the people. Some delegates to the 1787 constitutional convention believed yearly meetings were not necessary, for there would not be enough legislative business for Congress to deal with annually. Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts argued that the time should be fixed to prevent disputes from arising within the legislature, and to allow the states to adjust their elections to correspond with the fixed date. A fixed date also corresponded to the tradition in