num_pages: 336
description: The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Impeachment shows that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a long history.Lichtmans important bookuses history to contextualize the fix were 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 worlds 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 mans 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 todays 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 changedwe dont outright ban people from voting anymorebut the battle and the stakes remain just as high.
language: English
title: The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present
publisher: Harvard University Press