Uncounted

November 1, 2019
A law professor examines the persistent measures that still hinder citizens of color and the elderly from voting in America. There is a sad sense of history's repeating itself in this focused, hard-hitting, and highly relevant work, which moves from the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, which effectively tore down hindrances to voting in the South, to today's newly erected voter suppression tools by the states. How could this happen? The culprit, as Daniels (Univ. of Baltimore School of Law) delineates, was the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder decision, in which "the Court found part of the [VRA] unconstitutional and removed protections from a majority of the South." Hence, where the VRA had abolished literacy tests and poll taxes and provided voter registrars in "recalcitrant jurisdictions throughout the South," new restrictions have been implemented in certain counties and states across the country. These include the early closing of polling places, the introduction of new voter ID laws (on Latinx voters especially), voter intimidation and deception, and the purging of voters from rolls (usually because a person hadn't voted in the past). Daniels sees these efforts as Republican measures to suppress the opposition--i.e., burgeoning minority communities that often vote Democrat. As she notes, "while whites enjoy overrepresentation at the ballot box, minority communities are younger and growing faster than white communities." The author examines each of these factors in specific chapters with an eye toward the legal ramifications, but she also offers plenty of useful real-world examples. She humanizes this dreary depiction by illustrating the case of her grandmother, who grew up in rural Louisiana and lived through the restrictions to voting during the Jim Crow era; today, she still faces restrictions because she could not produce a birth certificate. An accessible human story of a longtime history of voter suppression.

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December 1, 2019

Examining access to the ballot box in the United States through the lenses of history, law, and race, Daniels (Univ. of Baltimore Sch. of Law) explores the ways that methods of election administration affect voter confidence and participation in America's self-proclaimed democratic process. Daniels's findings expose premeditated, strategic assaults on access to the ballot box aimed to disenfranchise historically Democratic voters, particularly people of color, the poor, and the elderly. Reaching back to the post-Civil War and Jim Crow eras, Daniels shows voter suppression works in cycles in which backlash arises to reverse progress toward achieving fuller participation. The author explains how, in the past two decades, strict voter ID laws along with voter roll purges and a reduction in early voting have led to further disfranchisement. To confront the challenges of voter suppression, Daniels suggests a three-part effort: educate, legislate, and litigate. VERDICT Replete with documentary evidence and examples, this work sounds an alarm for any and all readers interested in reversing the damage and danger of the nondemocratic dynamic threatening truth, justice, and the fight to vote.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2019
Voter ID laws, voter purges, the disenfranchisement of felons, gerrymandering, fake ads, intimidation campaigns?such are the tools of modern voter suppression. In this guide to the practice and its effects a law professor Daniels, former deputy chief in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, describes how it works and provides a road map and a call to arms for participants in what she calls the fight to vote. She draws clear lines connecting today's attacks on voters with the more blatantly violent suppression tactics of the past, identifying a historical cycle of hard-won expansions followed by push-backs from opponents. In concise chapters focused on specific suppression tactics, she offers strategies for moving the pendulum towards access. The book also covers key federal policy choices and court cases that have impacted voting rights and, lest readers lose sight of the impact of voter suppression on real people, draws on individual experiences, including those of Daniels' own family members?whose lives span the decades from Jim Crow-era fights for voting rights to the need to defend them in the present?to illuminate the issue's urgency. This book is a valuable resource for all participants in civic life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)