Allan J. Lichtman - The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present

My interest in voting rights is both academic and practical. As a first-year graduate student at Harvard University in 1967, I wrote my seminar research paper on the U.S. Justice Departments enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which Congress had enacted to protect black voting rights in the South. For reasons that I still cannot fathom today, John Doar, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division, gave this twenty-year-old student unfettered access to the records and staff of the divisions Voting Rights Section. I could poke through any files that I found of interest, except for personnel records, and interview the sections attorneys without restriction.

I found to my discouragement that nearly a decade of enforcement by these dedicated, competent, and hard-working lawyers had led to minimal progress toward enfranchising black people in states like Mississippi and Alabama. A weak law, protracted litigation, political meddling, and resistance by local officials and some southern judges crippled enforcement efforts. I was excited, however, by the prospects of renewed progress under the recently enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965.

At the time, of course, I had not an inkling that some fifteen years later, in 1983, I would contribute to progress on voting rights by serving as an expert witness in enforcing the 1965 act. I began work for the same Voting Section that I had studied as a student but eventually branched out into working for civil rights groups, private plaintiffs, and independent redistricting commissions. When justified, I also testified on behalf of state and local defendants in voting rights litigation.

In the 1980s, I mostly worked on challenges to at-large election systems that enabled white voters to control all legislative seats in local governments and to redistricting plans that discriminated against African Americans and later Hispanics. Typically, I relied on my expertise as a quantitative historian to analyze voting patterns to gauge the discriminatory effects of electoral systems in place for state and local governments. I explored whether minorities voted cohesively as a bloc in support of preferred candidates and whether opposition bloc voting by whites usually denied minority voters the opportunity to elect these candidates to public office. I also analyzed remedial plans to assess how effective they were in surmounting obstacles to minority voting opportunities.

By the twenty-first century, the focus of my voting rights work had shifted to the analysis of partisan and racial gerrymandering and new forms of franchise restrictions such as laws that required the presentation of specified forms of photo identification for voting. Rather than consider only the discriminatory effects of voting laws and practices, I began deploying historical methods to determine whether states in their adoption of voter photo ID or other restrictive laws had violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally discriminating against minority voters.

To date, I have worked as an expert witness in more than ninety voting rights cases. Nearly every case was fiercely contested, typically by white leaders battling to sustain the privileges that flowed from controlling politics in their states and communities. Discrimination creates winners as well as losers. My most gratifying experiences came in the early years, when our work as experts and lawyers helped local black people in the South defy the white power structure that had kept them subordinate for generations. At the risk of their livelihoods and their safety, African American citizens often joined the Justice Department and civil rights groups as plaintiffs in voting rights lawsuits.

Many decades of courtroom testimony and academic study have confirmed for me that although the players and the issues in voting rights change and evolve over time, the arguments remain familiar and the stakes are very much the same: Who has the right to vote in America, and who benefits from exclusion?