"Even in the fast and loose world of the Trump White House, the idea that a couple thousand disorganized protestors storming the U.S. Capitol might actually prevent a presidential succession was farfetched. Yet perfectly legal ways of overturning election results actually do exist, and they would allow a political party to install its own candidate in place of the true winner. Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman work through every option available...

"The Electoral College that governs America has been with us since 1804, when Thomas Jefferson's supporters redesigned it for his re-election. The Jeffersonians were motivated by the principle of majority rule. Gone were the days when a president would be elected by acclamation, as George Washington had been. Instead, given the emergence of intense two-party competition, the Jeffersonians wanted to make sure that the Electoral College awarded the...

"The inside story of the Supreme Court decisions that brought true democracy to the United States Today, Earl Warren is recalled as the chief justice of a Supreme Court that introduced school desegregation and other dramatic changes to American society. In retirement, however, Warren argued that his court's greatest accomplishment was establishing the principle of "one person, one vote" in state legislative and congressional redistricting. Malapportionment,...

"What's the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What's the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What's the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory....

"In a divided America, the biggest solvable problem fueling political extremism and dysfunction is hiding in plain party primaries. The Primary Solution shows how to fix them." --

Most of us are well aware that there is something fundamentally broken about the way we vote, but not why. In 'One Person, No Vote', the author chronicles a timely, comprehensive, and powerful indictment of the history of brutal race-based vote suppression, and its many modern iterations - from voter ID requirements and voter purges to election fraud, and stolen elections. She also traces the related history of the rollbacks to African American participation...

Since the creation of minority-dominated congressional districts eight years ago, the Supreme Court has condemned the move as akin to "political apartheid," while many African-American leaders argue that such districts are required for authentic representation. In the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date, David Canon shows that the unintended consequences of black majority districts actually contradict the common wisdom that whites...

When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer terror and insidious devices such as complex literacy tests and expensive poll taxes. Most African Americans would remain voiceless for nearly a century...