Chapter 36 — Further Reading

The voting-rights literature is vast, contested, and produced by authors with explicit political commitments. The reading list below is organized by perspective and is annotated to help you read each source on its own terms. The chapter's argument that you should be able to steel-man both sides depends on actually reading both sides.

Histories of the franchise

Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2009 revised ed.). The standard scholarly history of the U.S. franchise from the founding through the early twenty-first century. Keyssar is associated with the political left but the book is widely regarded as the comprehensive reference. His treatment of the post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement architecture and the long arc of nineteenth-century class-based and racial-based exclusion is unmatched in detail.

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2018). A representative articulation of the progressive view that contemporary state-level voting changes constitute a coordinated suppression effort with deep historical roots. Anderson, a historian, traces specific provisions and their disparate impacts. Read this for the strongest version of the suppression-narrative case. Read it carefully — Anderson's evidence is real and her analysis is serious.

Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund, Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter Books, 2012). A representative articulation of the conservative view that election-integrity rules are warranted and underrated and that suppression rhetoric overstates the burdens of common rules. Von Spakovsky, formerly with the Federal Election Commission and now at Heritage, makes the case for stricter list maintenance, voter ID, and tighter rules around mail voting. Read this for the strongest version of the integrity case.

Lorraine Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Cornell University Press, 2010, with updates). The standard academic treatment of the empirical magnitude of voter fraud. Minnite's compilation of prosecuted cases is the data backbone for the chapter's claim that fraud is real, prosecuted, and small relative to the scale of federal elections. Pair with the Heritage Foundation's election-fraud database (publicly available) for cross-source comparison.

The Voting Rights Act and its enforcement

Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (Foundation Press, multiple editions). The standard election-law casebook. Comprehensive treatment of VRA litigation, redistricting, campaign finance, and political-rights doctrine. Designed for law students but accessible to advanced undergraduates. The case excerpts and questions are more thorough than any single book on the subject.

Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, eds., Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965–1990 (Princeton, 1994). The standard empirical assessment of the VRA's first quarter-century. Particularly useful for the on-the-ground enforcement record under Section 5.

Nathaniel Persily, "The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act," Yale Law Journal (2007). Persily's analysis of the 2006 reauthorization and the question of how to update the coverage formula. Foreshadows the issues that Shelby County would raise five years later.

Atiba Ellis and Janai Nelson, eds., The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot (American Bar Association, multiple editions). Practitioner-oriented treatment of VRA litigation. Useful for case-law summaries and statutory interpretation guidance.

Empirical literature on voter ID and access

Benjamin Highton, "Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States," Annual Review of Political Science (2017). A meta-analytic review concluding that aggregate turnout effects of voter-ID laws are typically very small. Pair with the 2017 American Politics Research exchange on the Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson study and its replication.

Daniel Hopkins, Marc Hetherington, and Mark Hyde, "Voter Identification Laws and Election Outcomes" (working paper, ongoing). More recent work using larger datasets. Updates the Highton synthesis.

Burden, Canon, Mayer, and Moynihan, "Election Laws, Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unanticipated Consequences of Election Reform," American Journal of Political Science (2014). The standard reference for same-day registration's positive turnout effects.

Yoder et al., "How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?" Science Advances (2020); Thompson, Wu, Yoder, and Hall, "Universal Vote-by-Mail Has No Impact on Partisan Turnout or Vote Share," PNAS (2020). The principal academic studies finding that 2020 mail-voting expansion produced partisan-symmetric turnout increases.

Stephen Pettigrew, "The Racial Gap in Wait Times: Why Minority Precincts Are Underserved by Local Election Officials," Political Science Quarterly (2017). On polling-place wait-time disparities and their political consequences. Useful pairing with Shelby County aftermath analysis.

The 2020 election and its aftermath

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), "Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees" (November 12, 2020). The official statement, signed by Republican and Democratic election officials, that the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history." Director Christopher Krebs, a Trump appointee, was fired by President Trump after this statement.

Edward Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford, updated edition). Foley, an Ohio State law professor, traces the history of disputed presidential elections from Tilden-Hayes 1876 through 2020. Sober, comprehensive, primary-source-driven. The 2020 chapter walks through the legal challenges with judicial and procedural specificity.

Election Law Blog (electionlawblog.org), edited by Rick Hasen, UCLA School of Law. The principal current-events source for election-law scholarship and commentary. Hasen tracks every major case and statute as they emerge. Browsing the post-November-2020 archives is the fastest way to see how the legal challenges unfolded in real time.

The bipartisan congressional January 6 Select Committee Report (2022). The official record of the post-election conduct that culminated in the breach of the Capitol. The report's appendices contain the legal documents, depositions, and primary-source materials that would otherwise be hard to assemble. (Subsequent partisan responses to the report exist; the report itself is a primary source.)

Comparative and reform perspectives

Michael McDonald, The Turnout Myth: Voting Rates in American Elections (Oxford, forthcoming/2023). McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist who runs the U.S. Elections Project, on the measurement and meaning of turnout. The Voting-Eligible Population (VEP) framework that has supplanted Voting-Age Population (VAP) measurement is largely his contribution.

Pew Research Center, election-administration reports (pewresearch.org, ongoing). Pew's regular reports on voter registration, election administration, and public attitudes. The "Elections Performance Index" that Pew sponsored is one of the main cross-state comparative data sources.

Bipartisan Policy Center, Healthy Elections reports (ongoing). A reform-oriented organization with bipartisan staff. Their analyses of post-2020 administrative changes are useful precisely because the staff includes both Republican and Democratic election lawyers.

The Brennan Center for Justice, Voting Laws Roundup (ongoing, brennancenter.org). A left-leaning organization, but the catalog of state-level legislation is the standard reference. Pair with the Heritage Foundation's election-integrity work for the conservative compilation of the same legal landscape.

The Heritage Foundation election-integrity portal (heritage.org/election-integrity). The conservative compilation. Includes the prosecuted-fraud database, state-by-state policy recommendations, and analyses written by Hans von Spakovsky and others.

Primary documents

Read at least one of these in the original:

• Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) — the majority and Ginsburg's dissent.
• Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. ___ (2023) — Roberts's majority.
• Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. ___ (2021) — Alito's majority and Kagan's dissent.
• The Voting Rights Act itself (52 U.S.C. § 10301 et seq.) — short, direct, accessible.
• The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (Pub. L. 117-328, Division P) — the legislative text.
• Brad Raffensperger's January 2, 2021 telephone call recording — primary-source evidence in the Georgia post-election proceedings.