Campaigns & Elections: Voting Rights

This page highlights certain issues relating to voting rights, historically and currently.

In addition to the issues highlighted in the resources listed below, other issues to be aware of include:

  • Accessibility by older voters and voters with disabilities
  • Ballot length
  • Paper ballot designs (like the "hanging chad" that may have changed the results of the 2004 Presidential election)
  • Electronic voting (security/vulnerability to hacking/user experience)
  • Ethnic and racial bias
  • Language accessibility
  • Timing of voter access
  • Voter identification laws, such as the recently-challenged Texas law requiring a government-issued identification card
  • Voter intimidation/discouragement

Gerrymandering/Redistricting

  • Engstrom, Erik J.
    Partisan gerrymandering and the construction of American democracy.
    Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2013]
    From the publisher:  "[A] historical perspective on the effects of gerrymandering on elections and party control of the U.S. national legislature..."
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. JK1341 .E64 2013

Dis-enfranchisement

  • ​López-Guerra, Claudio
    Democracy and disenfranchisement : the morality of electoral exclusions
    Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. JF831 .L66 2014 and digitally.
  • Holloway, Pippa.
    Living in infamy : felon disfranchisement and the history of American citizenship.
    Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. KF1341 .E64 2013

Absentee/Overseas/Military Voters

The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) provides information and assistance for military service members and their families and overseas citizens.
 

Voting Rights and Suffrage

  • Bassetti, Victoria.
    Electoral dysfunction : a survival manual for American voters.
    New York: The New Press, 2012.
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. JK1976 .B33 2012
  • Keyssar, Alexander.
    The right to vote: the contested history of democracy in the United States.
    New York: Basic Books, c2000.
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. JK1846 .K48 2000
  • Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1815-1902.
    Suffrage: a natural right
    Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 1894.
    From Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO): Women: Transnational Networks.
  • Schechter, Patricia Ann
    Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American reform, 1880-1930 
    Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c2001
    Columbia Libraries Catalog Call No. E185.97.W55 S34 2001