Abstract
In the summer of 2013, the US Supreme Court changed the course of electoral history by striking down Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). This part of the federal VRA defined jurisdictions that had a history of voting discrimination against minority populations. In effect, before the summer of 2013, election law was frozen in nine whole states and parts of six other states (56 counties and two townships), which were defined as “covered” jurisdictions and subject to Section 5 of the act.1 Every time one of those jurisdictions wanted to make even the smallest voting change, they had to apply to the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the DC Federal District Court. Together, the DOJ and the court halted a number of election changes deemed to be discriminatory to both African Americans and Native Americans.
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Notes
See for example Raskin, Jamin. 2004. “A Right-to-Vote Amendment for the U.S. Constitution: Confronting America’s Structural Democracy Deficit.” Election Law Journal 3(3): 559–573.
See also Keyssar, Alexander. 2000. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books.
Polgar, Paul J. 2011. “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black Voting Rights in Early National New York.” American Nineteenth Century History 12(1): 1–23.
James, Scott C. and Brian L. Lawson. 1999. “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America’s Gilded Age: Electoral College Competition, Partisan Commitment and the Federal Election Law.” American Political Science Review 93(1): 115–131.
McDuffie writes that the conservatives gradually “assumed the Democratic label” in the early 1870s (page 83). See McDuffie, Jerome A. 1979. Politics in Wilmington and New Hanover County, North Carolina, 1865–1900: The Genesis of a Race Riot, unpublished PhD dissertation, Kent State University.
Tyson, Timothy B. and David S. Cecelski. 1998. “Introduction” in David. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (eds.) Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press.
One scholar of immigration, Monica W. Varsanyi, argues that “the two primary qualifications for voting were residence in a particular place and not being a British citizen, with secondary (though no less important) property-owning, racial, religious and gender qualifications” (2005: 116). This appears to be a matter of emphasis of qualifications by various scholars. Monica W. Varsanyi. 2005. “The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of Non-citizen Voting: Immigration and the Shifting Scales of Citizenship and Suffrage in the United States.” Space and Polity, 9(2): 113–134, DOI: 10.1080/13562570500304956.
See also Raskin, Jamin B. 1993. “Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141: 1391–1470.
Aylsworth, Leon E. 1931. “The Passage of Alien Suffrage.” The American Political Science Review 25(1): 114–116.
For an excellent analysis of registration policies and history of easing registration, see Hanmer, Michael. 2009. Discount Voting: Voter Registration Reforms and Their Effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Link, Jessica N., Martha Kropf, Mark Alexander Hirsch, Flora M. Hammond, Jason Karlawish, Lisa Schur, Douglas Kruse, and Christine S. Davis. 2012. “Assessing Voting Competence and Political Knowledge: Comparing Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries and ‘Average’ College Students.” Election Law Journal 11(1): 52–69.
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Kropf, M.E. (2016). Acquiring Voting Rights. In: Institutions and the Right to Vote in America. Elections, Voting, Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-30171-0_5
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