How Americans Vote

One well-known consequence of the Great Florida Election Debacle of 2000 was the widespread public discovery, or realization, that Americans vote in different ways (and according to different rules) depending on where they live. As we all learned during our collective, national crash course on electoral federalism, residents of some American counties voted by punching holes in pieces of paper; others made marks with pencils; still others pulled mechanical levers on large, clumsy metal machines. In addition, registration laws varied from one state to another, as did the rules for counting and recounting ballots. Although the 2000 election was a national one—and its most prominent objective was to select the nation’s chief executive—even the right to vote for President varied among the states: many men and women who would have been enfranchised in other states were not permitted to vote in Florida because they had once been convicted of committing felonies. Not surprisingly, one of the key thrusts of electoral reform efforts since 2000 has been towards nationalizing, or at least standardizing, the administration of elections. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) took several steps in that direction, particularly with regard to technology and registration lists; and progressive reformers have advocated numerous additional measures, including a national registration system, a federal agency to superintend election practices (an agency far stronger than the hapless, HAVA-created Election Assistance Commission), and even a national popular vote to replace the decentralized intricacies of the Electoral College. This recent interest in national uniformity in election practices is not without precedent; similar impulses helped to drive the ‘‘Motor Voter’’ law (the National Voter Registration Act of 1993) and can be discerned as far back as 1842 when Congress attempted to mandate single-member districts for congressional elections. The impulse to nationalize also has deep, influential parallels in the history of the franchise: both after the Civil War and during the long 1960s, national laws protecting the right to vote eradicated many state franchise restrictions in the name of promoting democracy itself. Indeed, the history of voting rights has certainly shaped the tendency of contemporary reformers— who favor greater and easier political participation—to equate national uniformity with progress. Almost reflexively, the decentralized administration of elections appears linked to a history of racism and class bias, to undemocratic exclusions tailored to conditions in individual states (or even counties and cities). Imposing democracy as a national value has consequently seemed to demand overturning a heritage of decentralization that has often been undemocratic in its thrust. A good electoral system, accordingly, is one that is national and standardized—where the same rules, procedures, and technology are deployed throughout the country. Political scientist Alec C. Ewald wants to challenge that perspective. His informed—if sometimes tendentious—book takes a sustained and multiangled look at the ‘‘local dimension of American suffrage,’’ and he finds much to be admired—or at least not condemned—in the fact that the conduct of elections has long been controlled and shaped by Alex Keyssar is the Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 10, Number 4, 2011 # Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2011.10406