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This chapter considers the electoral impact the new, wider array of voter registration and election administration laws using a new data set collected on state electoral rules between 1972 and 2008. States vary tremendously as to how easy it is to register and to vote, and previous research suggests that these laws affect who votes because they change the cost of voting. However, most of these studies rely on cross-sectional data, and usually consider the influence of one reform at a time. The chapter provides aggregate (state-level) analyses of the effects of changes in these rules on voter turnout. These analyses help us address the question of whether overall voter turnout has increased as a result of these legal changes. It finds modest effects of election day registration, of absentee voting, and of moving the closing date for registration closer to the election on overall turnout. The effect of early voting is less clear.

The Turkish government remained furious at French actions in the Sanjak. As voter registration began, violence and intimidation grew dramatically. The League of Nations electoral commission staffing the registration bureaus remonstrated repeatedly with French officials about stopping the coercion, and created a special tribunal to hear cases arising from infractions of the electoral regulations. As violence increased, and as registrations of “Turks” remained below 50%, the Turkish government held France responsible. French mandatory officials sought ways to increase Turkish registrations, while the League electoral commission insisted on equal access for all voters. Rumors surfaced of a secret agreement that guaranteed the Turks a majority in the new Assembly. By May 31, 1938, as it became clear that enforcing free choice for all voters would not produce that Turkish majority, the French High Commissioner appointed a new Delegate to declare martial law and implement the secret agreement.

This chapter discusses the passage of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), called the “motor voter” law, and its contribution to voter inclusion and voter participation. Passed in 1993, the NVRA opened up the voter registration process in a number of ways, including by requiring registration services at departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) and public assistance agencies, allowing voters to register by mail, and requiring state elections officials to supply voter registration drives with voter registration forms. NVRA has been responsible for literally tens of millions of new voter registrations, and as private legal actions against states for failure to implement the law have increased, and been successful, those numbers have continued to rise. The NVRA debate and litigation are also a case study of one party fighting, on the supposed basis of combating election fraud, a reform that was predicted to and has increased participation in the political process.

This chapter examines contemporary policy changes that have made it more difficult to register to vote or cast a ballot. Modern voter restriction arises from an administrative asymmetry. Federal voting rights protections are new and to a great degree judge-made, with little associated investigative or enforcement power. State electoral administrative capacity, by contrast, has grown markedly since the 2000 general election. The centralization of elections administration at the state level has enabled the development of a variety of regulations and administrative practices that make voting more difficult, typically by imposing administrative burdens for individual voters. Such policies have predictably larger effects on poorer voters, older voters, and voters from racial and ethnic minority groups. Yet these policies routinely withstand judicial scrutiny because they are uniformly administered and defended as means of promoting electoral integrity. Through a detailed study of the Crosscheck program, a large multistate record-sharing agreement administered in Kansas, this chapter shows the current legal blind spots and administrative asymmetries effectively authorize practices that may restrict voting without running afoul of voting rights protections. Crosscheck also shows how seemingly trivial policies, in combination, may interact in ways that focus administrative burdens on very specific groups of voters.

Throughout the period between the First and Third Reform Acts, politics was ultimately about issues. However, turning these views into votes, and votes into electoral majorities was a highly complex and time-consuming business. The hard annual graft of voter registration reviewed in the last chapter was only the first step, and enormous additional effort was required to ensure that the registered electorate turned out on polling day. This chapter focuses on the processes involved and investigates three particular aspects of the campaign. The chapter begins by examining the essential elements of preparation undertaken by the parties, from finding themselves a candidate to organizing their canvass. It then examines the business of the canvass itself, and the role played by bribery and corruption in securing the support of the more unprincipled voters. After the campaign had ended, there was a long clearing-up process as bills relating to the contest were scrutinized and discharged: the final section of the chapter reviews the costs of electioneering.

This chapter discusses the 2008 presidential elections. The problems on Election Day were not as pervasive as they might have been due to experience gained by voting rights advocates, election administrators and lawyers, and the courts over eight contentious electoral years in which they all engaged in microscopic but necessary scrutiny of the registration and voting process. Many of the fights over registration and ballots that had previously played out after the election were waged well before the polls opened. More often than not, and in contrast from the previous two presidential election cycles, litigation resulted in court opinions that supported the rights of voters. Much of this litigation regarded partisan wrangling over the registration process. Nonetheless, thousands and thousands of voters faced unacceptable and unnecessary barriers to voting at the polling booth. Some issues arose because of a lack of preparedness, but some seemed due to attempts by the Republican Party to use election laws for partisan advantage by suppressing the vote. Allegations were made against Democrats as well in 2008, particularly during the primaries.

Chapter 3 discusses the “access versus integrity” framing of debates about registration and balloting procedures, particularly as it has developed in the United States. It identifies several areas where the choice of voting procedures does present a trade-off between these values: the secret ballot, the rules for changing voters’ place of residence on the electoral rolls, mail and absentee voting, mobile polling places, voter identification requirements, and internet voting. But the study also identifies several areas where both inclusion and security may be enhanced: automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, online and automated voter registration, posting provisional voter rolls prior to Election Day, early (in-person) voting, and decentralized polling places. Thus the “access versus integrity” framing may limit opportunities to improve both access and integrity through policies designed to strengthen electoral integrity and bipartisan agreement.

This chapter chronicles the VEP’s impact on black southerners and politics after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under the leadership of Vernon Jordan, the VEP went beyond voter registration and started programs to educate African Americans about the political process. The VEP also started hosting conferences designed to swell the number of black candidates running for various political offices across the South. During this period, not only did the VEP increase the number of black southern voters, it also grew black political power in a variety of ways at local and state levels across the American South.

The Sanjak became independent on November 29, 1937, amid celebrations by local Turks. France and Turkey became embroiled in renewed controversy as Ankara claimed that mandatory officials were trying to thwart the Sanjak’s independence. Paris rushed to comply with Turkey’s demands, arresting Arab activists and sending high-ranking French officers to Ankara to discuss joint military actions. Turkish diplomats in Ankara objected to the new electoral regulations for the Sanjak, insisting that each voter had the right to declare his affiliation to any of the specified groups he chose; registration by community had not been intended to serve as a census of the relative population sizes, the Turks insisted. France agreed with Turkey’s demands, increasingly certain that Turkish neutrality would be essential if the growing tension in Europe spilled into war. Allowing anyone to register in any community encouraged both Turkish and Arab activists to recruit every potential voter.

This chapter focuses on the Ku Klux Klan's uneven presence across North Carolina counties, and explains how the significant variation in Klan presence related to the patterning of racial competition in different regions of the state. Focusing on demographic, economic, and political dimensions of competition, the analysis demonstrates how the racial composition of neighborhoods, public spaces, and the labor market, as well as voter registration patterns and NAACP organizing efforts, shaped the contours of KKK mobilization. The chapter also emphasizes the spatial character of competition, showing how certain dimensions operated in a highly-localized manner while others had diffuse effects on Klan presence.

This chapter examines the importance of black and Latino coalitions in the political campaigns of Chicago mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and Jesse Jackson in 1984. Starting with the Progressive anti-machine coalitions in Chicago in the 1970s, voter-registration drives led to the movement to unseat Mayor Jane Byrne and elect Harold Washington as mayor in 1983. Jessie Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign employed the same political strategy used to defeat the Chicago Democratic machine: a long and sustained voter-registration drive, which created a multiethnic Rainbow Coalition and established a Progressive stump speech that addressed issues facing working-class Americans and immigrants from Latin America. In the process, blacks and Latino activists who supported Jackson in New York and other parts of the country developed Progressive political organizations like the Rainbow Coalition, which registered and mobilized voters.

In the post-war years, Memphis saw the growing political independence of its citizens. Black Memphians joined forces with white reformers and labor activists to hand Edward H. Crump his first electoral defeat in decades in 1948. Their effort resulted in the Crump machine's decline, a more democratic political environment, and local governmental reforms. Robert R. Church, Jr., carried on his battle to make the Republican Party embrace civil rights while a new generation of black activists, including Benjamin L. Hooks, bolstered civil rights efforts in Memphis and the South. In order to increase voter registration, politicize African Americans, and ultimately break the Jim Crow system, black Memphians, including J. E. Walker, began running for public office. The year 1954 saw the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a victory for the black Memphians and southerners who had long pushed for an end to the Jim Crow system.

Chapter 8 reviews the main findings of the book and identifies areas for future research. The general findings indicate that each of the state convenience voting laws (in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee/mail voting, and same day registration) as well solid state election administration can improve voter turnout and promote greater voting equality between the socio-economic classes and among non-Hispanic whites and racial/ethnic minorities. The study demonstrates the value of an advanced causal inference design applied to a rich dataset on American adults (national voter files). It highlights the importance of measuring the effects of multiple convenience voting laws and election administration simultaneously. Future applications of the accessible voting framework can be used to understand the impacts of new election reform laws such as automatic voter registration, and to evaluate whether these factors also promote higher turnout among other historically marginalized voting groups such as the young and low-educated.

This chapter focuses on 1950s and 1960s, which witnessed significant advancements in voting rights as well as important tactical shifts in vote suppression. While the traditional tactic of playing games with voter registration and registration lists persisted, new strategies were developed from well-established devices and soon became the preferred weapons for suppressing the vote of political opponents. In the narrow window prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, political dynamics had already started to shift. Given the strong Democratic tendencies of voters of color as a result of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, and given the backlash against civil rights, operatives in the Republican Party devised a strategy to suppress minority turnout by challenging voters' eligibility to vote at the polls.

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This chapter describes the small settlement around the train stop Mileston and the Delta region of Mississippi. It tells details of the story of 14 local, primarily farmers and how they tried to register to vote in April 1963 and the intimidation by the white community as a result. Their names were printed in the newspaper so white business people could retaliate and Hartman Turnbow's home was firebombed by night riders. Turnbow was arrested on trumped up charges following the episode. It describes the backgrounds of five SNCC organizers, John Ball, Hollis Watkins, Lawrence Guyot, Sam Block and Bob Moses. Two interviews are presented: farmers and leaders Ralthus Hayes and John Daniel Wesley.