Chapter 36 — Key Takeaways

  • The franchise has expanded enormously over 250 years. From roughly 6% of the U.S. population in 1788 to virtually every U.S. citizen 18 and older today. The expansion came through constitutional amendments (the 15th in 1870, the 19th in 1920, the 24th in 1964, the 26th in 1971), Supreme Court decisions (Harper, Harrison v. Laveen, others), federal statutes (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993), and state-level changes. The arc bends toward inclusion, slowly and unevenly.

  • The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a watershed. Section 2 prohibits voting practices that result in racial denial or dilution. Section 5 required federal preclearance of voting changes in covered jurisdictions. Section 4(b) was the coverage formula. The 1982 amendments shifted Section 2 to a results test.

  • Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the Section 4(b) coverage formula, leaving Section 5 dormant. The Court did not strike down Section 5 itself; it held that the 1965 coverage formula was no longer constitutionally defensible because it relied on data that no longer matched on-the-ground conditions. Without a coverage formula, no jurisdictions are subject to Section 5. Congress has not enacted a replacement formula.

  • Section 2 remains active. Allen v. Milligan (2023) affirmed that Section 2 still requires Gingles-framework remedies for vote dilution. Brnovich v. DNC (2021) established multi-factor "guideposts" for vote-denial claims. Most VRA litigation since 2013 has occurred under Section 2.

  • Felony disenfranchisement varies enormously by state. Approximately 5 million Americans cannot vote because of a felony conviction; about 75% are not currently incarcerated. Maine, Vermont, and DC allow voting from prison. Most states restrict voting during incarceration but restore rights upon release or after parole/probation. Florida's Amendment 4 (2018) experience illustrates how ballot-measure outcomes can be substantially shaped by subsequent legislative implementation.

  • Recent state-level changes have moved in opposite directions. Roughly 36 states require some form of voter ID. Online registration is in ~42 states; automatic registration in ~22; same-day registration in ~22. Mail voting expanded sharply during the 2020 pandemic and has partially persisted. Drop boxes have expanded in some states and been restricted in others.

  • The empirical evidence on suppression effects is more modest than activist rhetoric on either side suggests. Strict photo-ID laws produce small aggregate turnout effects (typically below 1 percentage point) with larger effects on specific subgroups. Polling-place reductions have moderate localized effects. Same-day and automatic registration have measurable positive turnout effects (3–7 points). The 2020 mail-voting expansion was partisan-symmetric (Yoder et al.; Thompson et al.).

  • Voter fraud occurs but at rates too low to determine federal-election outcomes. The Brennan Center's compilation, the GAO's 2014 study, Lorraine Minnite's research, and even the Heritage Foundation's database (which contains roughly 1,500 prosecuted cases nationwide across all years and all forms of fraud) indicate that fraud is real, prosecuted, and small in magnitude. Whether the rarity of fraud justifies relaxed rules or whether public confidence is itself a legitimate state interest is genuinely contested.

  • The 2020 election was not stolen. Sixty-plus court cases challenging the results were dismissed, including by judges Trump had appointed. Recounts and audits in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin confirmed Biden's victory. Republican election officials in key states — Raffensperger (GA), Ducey (AZ), Shirkey (MI), and others — certified results despite political pressure. The institutional system held.

  • The persistence of election denial is a fact about American political culture. Approximately one-third of Americans, and roughly two-thirds of self-identified Republicans, continue to believe the 2020 election was illegitimate. This belief is empirically wrong; its persistence is real and consequential. Chapter 37 examines the political dimension.

  • The 2024 election produced a peaceful transfer of power. The institutional system that some had questioned in 2020 produced a Republican victory in 2024 that all parties accepted. The system that Democrats had defended in 2020 was the system that produced their loss in 2024. In both cases, the system worked as designed.

  • The Electoral Count Reform Act (2022) is the major bipartisan voting-rights reform of the period. It clarified that the Vice President's role in counting electoral votes is ceremonial, raised the threshold for congressional objections from one member to one-fifth of each chamber, and tightened state procedures for designating electors. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act have not passed.

  • U.S. turnout is below the OECD average, partly because of registration burden. Most peer democracies register voters automatically as a function of citizenship; most U.S. voters must affirmatively register. The decentralization of U.S. election administration through ~10,000 local jurisdictions is a deliberate constitutional design choice with both costs (variability, dispute fragmentation) and benefits (institutional resilience, no single point of failure).

  • Election administration is a profession under stress. Surveys find approximately one-third of local election officials reported being personally threatened or harassed since 2020. Veteran officials have left the profession. The 2024 election was nonetheless administered competently by the officials who remained. Professional infrastructure (the Election Center, NASS, NASED) has expanded in response.

  • Steel-manning matters here above all. Voter ID, mail voting, drop boxes, polling-place hours, and registration rules are policy choices that have real but typically modest turnout effects. They are also choices about what kind of democracy you want — how much access against how much administrative consistency, how much state autonomy against how much federal floor. Reasonable people, looking at the same evidence, can reach different conclusions. The point of the chapter is to give you the evidence a reasonable person should be looking at.