The Embattled Vote in America. From the Founding to the Present
Alan J. Lichtmann
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
315 pages
ISBN: ?????
Who has the right to vote? And who benefits from exclusion? Much in line with others countries, including the UK or France, the right to vote in US history has been restricted in view of the citizen’s wealth, sex, and literacy. Alan J. Lichtmann’s book proposes that due to lack of constitutional safeguarding of the voting right, the history of the USA can be interpreted as a long struggle to fill in this constitutional gap. He follows a chronological order to show the development of universal suffrage in the states from the time of the Founding Fathers to the present.
The book calls attention to the founders’ great error: they did not incorporate a right to vote in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Instead, control over elections was delegated to state and local governments. Local officials developed various electoral systems on different grounds and regulations and with little to no oversight. Partisans openly manipulated the organization of elections for their advantage.
The most important changes in terms of the development of suffrage in the USA are rendered and dealt with in separate chapters. While financial and economic qualifications (census) were erased in the nineteenth century in most states, the ideal of a “white man’s republic” persisted long after that. This ideal excluded women and racial minorities (mostly blacks) who had to struggle for making their voices heard. Nevertheless, in most of the states, voter identification laws, voter purges and registration requirements successfully barred the majority of the population from effectively voting.
Whenever reforms had been attempted, they invited a backlash. For instance, in 1870 the 15th Amendment disabled states to abridge the vote on the basis of race. A more democratic and pronounced version of the constitutional change would have expanded the voting rights, and would have ruled out restrictions like literacy tests or poll taxes. However, Westerners intended to ban Chinese-Americans, while Northerners wanted to contain Irish voters. Even the less democratic version of the amendment led to a rule of terror in the South and its gaps eventually helped white supremacy being reinforced and maintained.
Thus, (real) direct democracy has remained wishful thinking in most of the 19th and 20th century due to the political and economic interests of the political and social elite of the states already in possession of suffrage (hence access to political power). Chapter by chapter Lichtmann poignantly shows how political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression have become constant features of American democracy. As a testimony to the masterful use of a large reservoir of primary sources, the author back up his argument with stories of voter suppression or fraud to make his points even more nuanced.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that continuous attempts to widen the pool of eligible voters have also stood at the center of many political debates before and after general elections as well as fueled civilian protests and rallies to make the voices of non-voters heard. On one occasion, for instance, protesters marching through Marion, Alabama, on a winter night in 1965 were beaten with clubs and blinded with flashlights. Some of the black protesters fled into a nearby café, where the police chased after them, threw one of the protesters, Jim Jackson, against a cigarette machine and fatally shot him in the stomach. On another occasion, 35 years before the famous Bush-Gore debate in 2000, republican election officials in Florida discharged 180,000 ballots, casting aside one in ten African-American votes, often for minor irregularities. Republicans on the Supreme Court cast aside two centuries of jurisprudence when they ceased the recount, referring to the fact that the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States.
However, one cannot ignore the parallel Lichtmann tries to draw between the historical legacy of the constitutional pitfalls of American democracy and contemporary political efforts (right-wing and left-wing alike) to suppress voters; thus, contextualizing voter fraud and various political and social strategies of voter exclusion in a historical setting. He identifies the current push as the third crackdown on African-American voting rights in US history that still greatly affects African-American political (and civil) rights.
As for the relevance of the work, Lichtmann points out that this historical trajectory has its implication today. Parties still endeavor to use the franchise to their advantage. Both Republicans and Democrats suppress voting with a number of interventions: disenfranchisement felons, cutting back polling times and places, overcomplicating registration procedures, as well as purging rolls. Lichtmann also cites data from the 2014 elections: 140 million people did not vote (the elections had the lowest turnout since 1942). In 2016, just 25% of adults in the US voted for the Trump presidency.
Furthermore, the author comes forward with reform proposals (at this point the book can be rather read as manual on political theory and practice): abolishing the Electoral College, automatically registering voters, establishing national election standards, drawing less partisan voting districts, and resisting foreign interference. What is more, in order to reach these aims, the Supreme Court’s power to kill laws unilaterally should be eliminated (as President Lincoln had once suggested), and the two-party system ought to be replaced with proportional representation of congressional elections.
What will happen to US democracy? The parties are evermore bound on combining racial and nativist tensions. On the one hand, white men tend to prefer the Republican Party, while immigrants and African-Americans generally opt for the Democrats on the other. In this way, old parties amplify old antagonisms with eventually drawing on the same consequence: blocking the ballot box.
For any scholar or reader who is already familiar with American history and election systems, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, as it concisely discusses not only the pitfalls of US elections from a historical perspective, but it also provides valuable insights into 19th- and 20th-century US history too. However, in my view, the book cannot be used as a textbook for educational purposes below master level training at universities, as it covers a specific topic in a very detailed though in a highly fascinating way.
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