Trial Magazine

The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present
Allan J. Lichtman
Harvard University Press
hup.harvard.edu
336 pp., $27.95

More than 200 years since the country’s founding, many Americans still cannot freely exercise the right to vote. American University history professor Allan Lichtman contends that this results in part from the founders’ failure to include this right in the U.S. Constitution. Although amendments now protect the voting rights of racial minorities, women, and others, they “are framed negatively, stipulating not what the states must do to ensure people’s voting rights . . . but what they cannot do.” Without affirmative duties, Lichtman argues, states can disenfranchise groups of voters, with some states using voter identification laws and partisan gerrymandering that leave unfinished the “centuries-long battle for full suffrage.”