10 Things Every Writer Should Know About American Elections and Voting Rights
While writing our new book on the quest for voting rights in America, we began to realize that certain facts about this story are absolutely essential for any writer who touches on elections or voting. Over time, the list grew.
Here are our top 10, in chronological order—extracted from a rich and complicated history, one that is utterly relevant today.
1.) The right to vote was not enshrined in the Constitution as it was originally written; Congress left it to the states to decide who could vote, and when. At the nation’s birth, the majority of Americans of voting age could not legally vote.
2.) Over the years, different groups of Americans—poor people, African Americans, women, Native Americans—had to fight for the right to vote. Sometimes, people would win the right to vote only to lose it later on. This fight continues today.
3.) The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, granted African American men the right to vote. Black men voted by the hundreds of thousands during the period of Reconstruction, electing nearly 2,000 African American officeholders at almost all levels of government. By the end of the 19th century, through violence, intimidation, and restrictive voting laws, nearly all Black people were barred from voting and all Black elected officials swept from office.
4.) Voting rights for all Americans were not secured until nearly 200 years after the birth of the United States—August 8, 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The VRA was among the main accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement.
5.) The VRA was amended by Congress in 1975 to require voting and election information in multiple languages, not only English—a huge step towards making it possible for millions of Spanish-speaking Americans to participate in elections. Latinos, a diverse group ethnically and politically, are now the second largest voting bloc in the United States.
6.) Over the last 50 years, despite the VRA, opponents of democracy have found ways to limit the expansion of voting rights—including felon disfranchisement laws for nonviolent offenders, Voter ID laws, voter roll purges, extreme partisan gerrymandering, and other schemes meant to limit the number of people, especially poor people and people of color, who participate in elections.
7.) In 2010, in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and private organizations could spend unlimited amounts of money on election-related activities, overturning a century of campaign finance restrictions. Since then, a flood of “dark money” has swamped the American electoral process, giving outsize influence to shadowy private donors.
8.) In another landmark decision, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided in Shelby v. Holder that key sections of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional—namely, the sections that required states with a history of voting discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department before making any change to voting policies or practices. To many observers, the decision gutted the main purposes of the VRA, and has led to a new wave of discrimination in voting.
9.) Today, one of the main threats to voting rights is disinformation, particularly relating to voter fraud—a concept which underlies a new wave of voting restrictions. Experts consider voter fraud a myth, because it is statistically insignificant (in the words of one analyst, “infinitesimally rare.”)
10.) The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the late, longtime congressman and voting rights champion, seeks to strengthen the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and push back against attempts to shrink the electorate and dilute the voting power of Americans. The House of Representatives has passed versions of this bill twice—in 2021 and 2023—only to see it die in the Senate. It remains a blueprint for democratic reform in America.
Check out Michael Eric Dyson and Marc Favreau's Represent: The Unfinished Fight for the Vote here:
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