Voting in America

"How to Use This Book Introduction 1 Voting and Political Representation in the Constitution Q1. Did the original Constitution give all citizens a right to vote in presidential elections? Q2. Did the original Constitution of the United States grant citizens the right to vote for members of Congress? Q3. Did any African Americans have a right to vote in federal elections prior to the Civil War? Q4. Did the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 end the practice of states denying or abridging the right of African American men to vote in federal or state elections? Q5. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, did northern and western states in general comply with the letter of the Fifteenth Amendment? Q6. As it doubled the size of the American electorate, did the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) granting women the right to vote immediately transform American politics? Q7. Was the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (1971), which dropped the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, ratified primarily because the federal government was drafting eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old men to fight in the Vietnam War? Q8. Are there any other amendments to the U.S. Constitution that affected the right of American citizens to vote in federal and state elections? 2 Electoral Districting and the Warren Court Q9. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, did Congress allow state legislatures to determine the geographical lines of electoral districts for elections to the House of Representatives? Q10. Did the Republican Guarantee Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 4) provide the Supreme Court with a legal basis to invalidate House electoral districts if they contained unequal populations? Q11. If federal courts were unable to rely on the Republican Guarantee Clause to require states to equalize the populations of House electoral districts, could they invalidate a change in a state's electoral district lines based on race or ethnicity? Q12. As the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Republican Guarantee Clause was an appropriate basis to invalidate malapportioned House electoral districts, was there some other constitutional provision that the Court could utilize to invalidate malapportioned state electoral districts? Q13. When the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders that unequal electoral districts violated either the Equal Protection Clause or Article I, Section 2, did the Supreme Court invalidate the nature of representation underlying the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, and the U.S. House of Representatives? Q14. Did the Warren Court permit a state to maintain unequal electoral districts if the state's voters overwhelmingly approved this type of inequality via referendum or initiative? Q15. Did the Warren Court apply the principle of ""one person, one vote"" flexibly, allowing relatively small variations in population between electoral districts without requiring the state to explain or justify them? Q16. Did the Warren Court hand down any major decisions on the right to vote besides those related to apportionment and electoral districting? 3 The Voting Rights Act in the Twenty-First Century Q17. Was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 politically uncontroversial as it passed by large margins in both the Senate (77–19) and the House of Representatives (333–85)? Q18. As the Voting Rights Act of 1965 authorized an unprecedented degree of federal control and supervision over state electoral practices, was its constitutionality in doubt when it was enacted? Q19. Do federal ""examiners"" and ""observers"" of elections continue to play an important role in states subject to the ""special provisions"" of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? Q20. Was Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act redundant because it only banned what the Fifteenth Amendment already prohibited? Q21. Could a state use race as a factor in drawing electoral district lines to comply with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to such an extent that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? Q22. Did Congress ever broaden the Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against nonracial minorities, and to require states and political subdivisions to provide assistance to these minorities in exercising their voting rights? Q23. Has the constitutionality of all the provisions of the Voting Rights Act regarding its scope and coverage been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court? 4 Partisan Gerrymandering Q24. Has partisan gerrymandering evolved significantly throughout American political electoral history? Q25. Has the Supreme Court ever invalidated an extreme partisan gerrymander on constitutional grounds? Q26. Even if the Supreme Court will not consider the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering, can state courts strike down gerrymanders for violating state constitutions? Q27. If no state judicial remedy is available, are there any political remedies that disaffected citizens can pursue to rectify extreme partisan gerrymandering? Q28. As state courts have recently ruled that extreme partisan gerrymandering violates their state constitutions (Q26) and a number of states have established independent redistricting commissions (Q27), is it likely that partisan gerrymandering will soon disappear from American political life? 5 Ongoing Challenges Q29. Is voter fraud a serious problem in the modern United States? Q30. Do state voter identification (ID) laws have any legitimate purpose? Q31. Does the federal Constitution require states to disfranchise convicted felons? Q32. Even if there are legitimate reasons why states purge their voter registration lists, can such purges be used to suppress voting rights? Q33. Is it constitutional for a state to require that an elector of the Electoral College pledge to vote for the presidential candidate who won the state's popular vote and punish the elector if the pledge is not honored? Q34. Is there any way to circumvent or abolish the role of the Electoral College in presidential elections in favor of a national popular vote? Q35. Did Russia interfere in the 2016 presidential election to undermine American confidence in U.S. elections and the value of the right to vote? Q36. Apart from foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, are there additional reasons why voters have lost confidence in the value of the right to vote and the integrity of American democracy itself? Index"