Book Review

Canada and the United States

It is auspicious to work six years on a book about voting rights in the United States and publish it in 2000, when Americans came face to face with unfamiliar details about the conduct of their elections and saw the separate pieces of a process that they usually define only by its results. Alexander Keyssar had just such fortune with his monumental new study. Had he known the atmosphere into which the book would be born, perhaps he would have devoted more space to the casting and counting of ballots or anticipated how the Electoral College would focus new discussions about vote dilution. Despite the absence of such glaring relevance, Keyssar's book speaks to our recent national experience. It should be widely recommended and read for its ability to place many dilemmas of the election within a long and rocky history of voting.

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Keyssar explains that he wrote this book by accident: he realized, while planning something altogether different, that he could not, from existing scholarship, explain the legal framework within which workingmen did or did not engage in electoral politics. He set aside one project to embark on what he modestly calls "a chronicle" of the right to vote and "an account of the evolution of the laws . . . that defined and circumscribed the American electorate" (p. xx). But his book is more than that. It traces shifting, colliding, and sometimes contradictory understandings of this right and examines the conduct of elections as a factor in disfranchisement. Careful attention to the social context produces another story line about how responses to immigration, industrialization, war, and class conflict were expressed through laws about the right to vote.

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