The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present by Allan J. Lichtman (review)

Allan J. Lichtman’s The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present centers on Lichtman’s observation that there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution. His sweeping history of the country’s ensuing struggles over voting rights traces the immense significance of this missing feature in the nation’s founding document.

Lichtman’s book is an unusual amalgam of historical scholarship, contemporary policy study, and first-person narrative, drawing on his experience as an expert witness in recent voting rights cases. In the first five chapters, he provides a detailed history of voting rights to the mid-1960s, focusing on the efforts of various states to condition the right to vote based on property ownership, racial identity, gender, and immigrant status. This section of the book is an accessible and surprisingly rich history, a history that has been generally available only by referring to separate studies of shorter historical periods or individual aspects of voting rights (race or gender, for instance, but not both). The chapters on the antebellum effort to create a white man’s republic (chapter 2); the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century struggles over the post–Civil War extension of white and male supremacy in voting rights (chapter 3); and the efforts to secure voting rights for women (chapter 4) are full of powerful insights and detailed history.

In chapter 5, Lichtman provides a history of efforts to demobilize voters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that used the well-worn claim that various restrictions on voting were necessary to prevent voter fraud and the corruption of democratic elections. This chapter sets the stage for the remaining chapters of the book, which take the reader through recent political history. Chapter 6 offers a brief history of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chapter 7 highlights how various states with Republican Party majorities in their state legislatures have imposed new voter identification requirements and other mechanisms to address the imagined problem of voter fraud, which Lichtman illustrates has no evidence to support it; this chapter also describes the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 repeal of section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The impact of these efforts has fallen most heavily on the same voters who have been at the center of voting rights struggles throughout American history: African Americans and nonwhite immigrants.

Readers interested in the history of the South will find much value in The Embattled Vote in America. Lichtman describes the post–Civil War white southern resistance to African American voting as a central feature of his narrative. The deepening partisan divide in the United States is an important part of this history, and Lichtman adeptly traces the historical shift from the southern-based, pro-segregationist Democratic Party in the early twentieth century to the Republican Party’s dominance in the region. It is this partisan divide, Lichtman’s book illustrates, that has incentivized the more recent efforts of Republican state and national party leaders to obstruct African Americans and other racial minorities from voting in the decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Although this suppression began in southern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lichtman’s work illustrates how it has expanded throughout the nation in recent decades.

Lichtman concludes his book with recommendations for reforms based on his historical study and his more recent experience as an expert witness: “A constitutional right to vote, expanded motor voter registration, same-day registration, anti-gerrymandering requirements, independent redistricting commissions, the revival of voting rights preclearance, mandates for paper ballot trails, and secure voting technology would advance the democratic goal of assuring that America is governed truly by the consent of the governed” (pp. 256–57). Lichtman’s book provides ample historical and contemporary justifications for these policy...