On Give Us the Ballot

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is often treated as an ending, the triumphant close of the civil-rights movement's fight for the ballot. Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot, published in 2015 on the act's fiftieth anniversary, treats it instead as a beginning, and tells the long, unfinished story of what happened after: the decades of effort to enforce and expand the right to vote, and the equally determined decades of effort to roll it back. It is the modern history of the most basic right in a democracy, the one without which the others cannot be defended.

Berman's central argument is that the right to vote has never been settled, that it has been contested continuously since the Voting Rights Act passed, in a back-and-forth that continues now. He traces the act's enormous early success in enfranchising millions of Black Southerners who had been systematically excluded, and then follows the long counter-effort: the legal challenges, the new techniques of restriction that replaced the old, and the gradual narrowing of the act's protections through the courts. The story runs through the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a central enforcement mechanism of the act, after which several states moved quickly to impose new restrictions that the disabled provision had previously blocked.

The book's value is in showing voting rights as a continuous struggle rather than a finished achievement. The methods change, the literacy tests and poll taxes of the old order give way to voter-identification requirements, registration purges, poll closures, and changes to early voting, but the underlying contest, over who actually gets to cast a ballot that counts, never stops. Berman documents this as policy and law, with the detail of a reporter who covered it closely.

This belongs in a library of the republic under the lens of voting because the franchise is the keystone right of self-government. Every other protection in this collection depends, in the end, on the people's ability to choose and remove their rulers. A right that can be quietly narrowed, by rules that sound neutral but fall unevenly, is a right perpetually in play, and Berman's history is the indispensable guide to how that narrowing works and how it has been resisted.

It pairs directly with Carol Anderson's One Person, No Vote, also on these shelves, which focuses on the mechanics of suppression, and with the older voting-rights texts. Together they make the case that the vote, the most celebrated right of an American citizen, is also the one most continuously fought over.

Give Us the Ballot is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it for the long view, the reminder that the right to vote was not won once and kept, but won, eroded, defended, and contested across every decade since.