Keeping Down the Black Vote
Subtitle: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters
By: Frances Fox Piven, Lorraine C. Minnite, Margaret Groarke.
Publisher: New Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9781595583543
Subjects: African Americans -- Suffrage.; African Americans -- Politics and government.; Voting -- United States.
Genres: Non-fiction
Description: Today, over forty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 demolished bars to voting for African Americans, the effort to prevent black people — as well as Latinos and the poor in general — from voting is experiencing a resurgence. A myriad of new tactics, some of which adopt the mantle of “election reform,” has evolved to suppress the vote. In this sharply argued new book, three of America’s leading experts on party politics and elections demonstrate that our political system is as focused on stopping people from voting as on getting Americans to go to the polls.

In recent years, the Republican Party, the Bush administration, and the conservative movement have devoted a remarkable amount of effort to controlling election machinery (the scandal over federal prosecutors was in part over their refusal to gin up election-fraud cases). But Keeping Down the Black Vote shows that the effort to rig the system is as old as American political parties themselves, and race is at the heart of the game.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The party logic of voter demobilization; title: Race and party competition in post World War II America; title: Black voting power in the cities; title: Party resistance to national voter registration reform; title: Beyond race? The parties search for a "third way"; title: Keeping down the vote: the contemporary revival of vote; title: Suppression tactics; title: Epilogue; title: Notes; title: Index.