Who has the right to vote? And who benefits from exclusion? For most of American history, the right to vote has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, and literacy. Economic qualifications were eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man's republic persisted long after that. Women and racial minorities had to fight hard and creatively to secure their voice, but voter identification laws, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges continue to prevent millions of American citizens from choosing the next president. An award-winning historian who has testified in over ninety voting rights cases, Allan Lichtman gives us the deep history behind today's headlines and shows that calls of voter fraud, political gerrymandering, and outrageous attempts at voter suppression are nothing new. The players and the tactics have changed--we don't outright ban people from voting anymore--but the stakes are just as high. "Lichtman uses history to contextualize the fix we're in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise. Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change.

With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame." -- New York Times Book Review "The great value of Lichtman's book is the way it puts today's right-wing voter suppression efforts in their historical setting. He identifies the current push as the third crackdown on African-American voting rights in our history." --Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books.