Give Us the Ballot

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015), a work of political history by American reporter Ari Berman, tracks discourse about the right to vote from the mid-twentieth century to the present, contending that the United States has yet to recognize a universal right to vote in its legislation. Moreover, Berman argues that many demographics in the United States are routinely deprived of voting rights due to local interpretations of the law, often founded on prejudices about race, poverty, and criminality. Berman’s primary claim is that the debate over voting rights since the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson has been divided into two distinct camps: those of the belief that the Voting Rights Act should limit itself to providing a neutral “access” to the voting booth; and those who believe that it should actively engage in broadening access for the marginalized. Berman criticizes a number of contemporary politicians, and even Supreme Court justices, for perpetuating the oppression of minority voting rights by maintaining the argument of the former camp.

Berman begins with a review of President Johnson’s tenure over fifty years ago. In the late summer of 1965, he signed into law the Voting Rights Act. Secondary sources suggest that President Johnson understood his signature as something that would inaugurate a new era in the fundamental liberties of the American people to participate in the democratic process. At the same time, he held reservations that the signing would only add to the polarity between the North and South, possibly exacerbating future legislative churn and inertia. This moment, considered revolutionary by progressives, was conversely considered a huge setback by political conservatives. Berman argues that conservatives have been fighting for the last half-century to reverse or render ineffectual the Voting Rights Act’s provisions of voting rights. Many of these attempts have been successful, largely thanks to the strong conservative presence on the Supreme Court.

Next, Berman delves into the two contentious claims about what the Voting Rights Act is meant to do. Conservatives tend to follow the general argument that the act should merely distribute polling stations and personnel to optimize access to voting, which they would ideally measure through geographical, race-blind and class-blind population metrics. Progressives, on the other hand, argue that the act should be interpreted more broadly as a defense of a serious need for the systemic improvement of the political process, of which ballots are only an element. Their positions include increased representation for minorities, namely African-Americans, who remain the most disenfranchised group with respect to the impact of lack of access on voting rates. Using scrupulous research on politicians’ voting records, Berman notes that, ironically, the United States’ two main parties both tended to support the more progressive interpretation until 2006; it was mostly a relatively regressive Supreme Court that limited the interpretive scope of their legislation.



Despite the Supreme Court’s attempts to limit the power of the Voting Rights Act, the decades after its signing saw an increase in the voter registration rate of black people from less than one third to over 70 percent. Moreover, during the same years, the number of black people elected to office increased by a factor of 20. Even under Nixon, who installed arguably the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history, the nation remained more or less progressive. In 1982, an attempt to overturn a blatantly racist ruling against African-American voting rights from the first decade of the twentieth century was nearly squelched by the Reagan administration. It succeeded, but further polarized the divide between the North and South. The following years saw the first implementations of gerrymandering, the systemic redrawing of district lines to minimize the power of minority groups and likely Democrat voters. After George W. Bush was elected in 2000, he reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, but mainly on the grounds that not doing so would damage the Republican Party’s few ties to black voters.

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts led a 5-4 overturning of the renewed version of the Voting Rights Act, on the grounds that its disproportionate effects on black registration had violated the Constitution. This elicited condemnation from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who alleged that Justice Roberts and the other four overturning justices were injecting their own views into legislative matters outside their domain. Since then, attempts to restore the Voting Rights Act are likely to face limited success, since Republicans now leverage the precedent ruling that its broad implementation represents partisan racial favoritism.

Give Us the Ballot is a broad survey of the political transformations that have shaped the meaning of the Voting Rights Act through time. Berman makes the compelling suggestion that every piece of legislation is a living document. Despite its less-than-expansive endowment of liberties in the contemporary age, Berman’s analysis suggests that it will continue to evolve and inform the United States’ conception of the rights of democracy.