Why Voter Turnout Is So Low in the United States
From the very founding of the United States, elites have worked to disenfranchise and suppress voters — because they know a mobilized electorate of workers and poor people would transform the country.
Voters casts their ballots at ChiArts High School on March 15, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson / Getty
In recent years, states around the country have passed numerous laws restricting the right to vote. But this effort to contract the franchise — a fundamental assault on political democracy — is not unprecedented. Since the founding of the United States, elites have used their power to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of those they’d rather not see at the ballot box.
In the following interview, historian Alexander Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, discusses the long history the franchise fights in the United States with historian Adele Oltman. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Adele Oltman
We like to think of our country as exceptional compared to other Western democracies — even during the Trump era. Trump, according to the exceptionalism thesis, is subverting who we are as a country, especially our “values.” In your book you write about suffrage restrictions — who gets to vote and who doesn’t — beginning in the Revolutionary era. These restrictions seem to eclipse this narrative of American values.
Alexander Keyssar
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