Abstract
Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Revised Edition). New York, NY: Basic Books, 2009, 467 pp., $19.95 (paperback).
In the election world, we have a similar opportunity to do a “look back” at our own seminal conflict—namely, the events precipitated by the disputed 2000 presidential election. Much of the focus in academic and popular media circles has been on the ten-year anniversary of Bush v. Gore itself (handed down December 12, 2000), but the truth is that the decision set off nearly two years' worth of events culminating in the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. These events—while perhaps not as compelling as the sectional and political divisions that led to war in 1861—provides the backdrop for our current system of American election administration. For me, the running ten-year anniversary of those debates is far more important than the legacy of Bush v. Gore in explaining how and why we vote today. Fortunately, we already have our first great text chronicling the years following the 2000 election.
In September 2000, Alexander Keyssar, the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, released The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. The book traced the historical roots of our seemingly-familiar “right to vote,” illuminating its rich and often surprising back story and chronicling the ebb and flow of the franchise from the days of the Founding Fathers to the modern day. Keyssar's scholarship and writing were widely praised, earning the book the American Historical Association's Beveridge Prize and nods as a finalist for both the L.A. Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Of course as we now know, the “modern day” of September 2000 was not modern for long. Two months later, the disputed presidential election touched off a very eventful period in the field of election administration: Bush v. Gore, the enactment of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the 2007 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, all punctuated with running—and occasionally fierce—national debates about election law, policy, and technology. Keyssar recently released a revised edition of The Right to Vote that brings the story forward eight more years, filling in the period culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
This is not simply a supplement to the original edition to bring it current; as Keyssar notes in the Preface to the revised edition, “[i]t was the richness and complexity of [the] events [of 2000-2008]—and not simply the passage of time—that led me to the decision to prepare a new edition” (p. xi). Accordingly, while the revised edition adds only slight changes to the chapter on federal voting rights legislation, one new chapter on election reform post-2000, and an update of the conclusion acknowledging that “some things do look a bit different in 2009 than they did in 1999” (p. xii), it does so in a way that gives even this recent history a place in Keyssar's larger narrative about the ever-changing right to vote in America.
The heart of the revised edition is Chapter 9 (“The Story Unfinished”), which manages to pack eight tumultuous years into fewer than fifty fascinating and well-written pages. Keyssar traces the efforts across the nation to diagnose and repair the perceived flaws with America's election system and does a remarkable job in capturing the wide-ranging flavor of the debate—federal/state/local tensions, disputes about technology, and especially the sharpening and increasingly caustic exchanges between Democrats who feared disenfranchisement and Republicans who feared fraud. The book is especially good in its skillful distillation of the fight about photo identification (“Identify Yourself,” pp. 283–287), which manages to succinctly summarize and explain the running battles in Georgia, Indiana, and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, about the wisdom and constitutionality of ID requirements. As the 2010 election brings to state capitols (and Capitol Hill) large numbers of pro-ID policymakers and legislators, Keyssar's book—but especially those five pages—should be required for anyone who seeks to bring themselves up to speed on the current state of play.
The chapter is also terrific in its treatment of an issue that has gone less-noticed over the years: the treatment of voters with cognitive impairments (“Boundaries of Competence”, pp. 287–291). Keyssar traces legislative and judicial developments affecting the right of these individuals to cast a ballot—what he calls the “last suffrage movement”—and sees “strong threads” linking it to other efforts to expand the franchise (p. 291).
The only problem with Keyssar's unfinished story is that it is still unfinished; the chapter ends with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and an optimistic conclusion:
Electoral advances for the Democrats in some states [in 2008] seemed likely to slow the drive for photo-ID requirements, and a sudden, postelection surge of interest in universal voter registration systems offered the possibility of increasing turnout and toning down the warfare over “fraud” and “suppression.” The historical pendulum, once again, seemed poised to swing. (p. 294).
Of course, the pendulum did swing—but in the opposite direction than Keyssar had expected. Two years later, the 2010 elections brought to power new majorities and chief election officials across the country committed to combating voter fraud through the enactment of photo ID requirements and other measures to ensure the integrity of the voting process. Whether or not the pendulum swings back again in 2012 remains to be seen; either way, Keyssar's revised edition of The Right to Vote is a must read (or re-read) for anyone who wants to understand the impact of American political history—both the last two centuries and the past decade—on the debates that frame our nation's current system of elections.