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In contrast to the anxiety surrounding our voting system, with stories about voter suppression and manipulation, there are actually quite a few positive initiatives toward voting rights reform. Professor Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on our electoral system, examines these encouraging developments in this inspiring book about how regular Americans are working to take back their democracy, one community at a time.Told through the narratives of those working on positive voting rights reforms, Douglas includes chapters on expanding voter eligibility, easing voter registration rules, making voting more convenient, enhancing accessibility at the polls, providing voters with more choices, finding ways to comply with voter ID rules, giving redistricting back to the voters, pushing back on big money through local and state efforts, using journalism to make the system more accountable, and improving civics education. At the end, the book includes an appendix that lists organizations all over the country working on these efforts.Unusually accessible for a lay audience and thoroughly researched, this book gives anyone fed up with our current political environment the ideas and tools necessary to affect change in their own communities.

This Article provides the first comprehensive look at state constitutional provisions explicitly granting the right to vote. We hear that the right to vote is "fundamental," the "essence of a democratic society," and "preservative of all rights." But courts and scholars are still searching for a solution to the puzzle of how best to protect voting rights, especially because the U.S. Supreme Court has underenforced the right to vote. The answer, however, is right in front of us: state constitutions. Virtually every state constitution includes direct, explicit language granting the right to vote, as contrasted with the U.S. Constitution, which mentions voting rights only implicitly. Yet those seeking to protect the right to vote have largely ignored the force of state constitutions, particularly because many state courts "lockstep" their state constitutional voting provisions with the narrow protection the U.S. Supreme Court has afforded under the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. This mode of analysis curtails the broader explicit grant of voting rights in state constitutions. This Article explains why the lockstepping approach is wrong for the right to vote and advocates for courts to use a state-focused methodology when construing their state constitutions. It does so through the lens of recent voter ID litigation, showing how the outcome of state constitutional challenges to voter ID laws turns on whether the reviewing state court faithfully and independently applies the state constitutional provision conferring voting rights. The textual and substantive differences between U.S. and state constitutional voting-rights protections requires a state-focused methodology for state constitutional clauses that grant the right to vote. Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution points directly to state qualification rules to determine voter eligibility. State constitutions explicitly confer voting rights, while the U.S. Constitution merely implies the right to vote through negative language. In ...