Embattled Vote in America

The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment shows that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a long history.“Lichtman’s important book…uses history to contextualize the fix we’re in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise… Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame.”—New York Times Book ReviewAmericans have fought and died for the right to vote. Yet the world’s oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees no one, not even its citizens, the right to elect its leaders.For most of U.S. history, suffrage has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Economic qualifications were finally eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man’s republic persisted long after that. Today, voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of American citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box.An award-winning historian who has testified in more than ninety voting rights cases, Allan Lichtman gives us the deep history behind today’s headlines and shows that calls of voter fraud, political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression are nothing new. The players and the tactics have changed—we don’t outright ban people from voting anymore—but the battle and the stakes remain just as high.

Lichtman’s important book emphasizes the founders’ great blunder: They failed to enshrine a right to vote in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights…The Embattled Vote in America traces the consequences through American history…[Lichtman] uses history to contextualize the fix we’re in today…Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame., The great value of Lichtman’s book is the way it puts today’s right-wing voter suppression efforts in their historical setting. He identifies the current push as the third crackdown on African-American voting rights in our history., A sweeping look at the history of voting rights in the U.S., focusing on the constant struggle to extend suffrage in this country., An important and timely work…Provides a general audience with historical context to improve public understanding of current voting rights controversies…Anyone concerned about this pressing public policy issue will find this book to be a valuable resource., [A] sweeping history of the country’s ensuing struggles over voting rights…Provides ample historical and contemporary justifications for [his] policy prescriptions to ensure that American democracy remains credible and viable in the twenty-first century.

Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and the author of many acclaimed books on U.S. political history, including White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), and The Case for Impeachment. He is regularly sought out by the media for his authoritative views on voting and elections.