New edition of BALLOT BATTLES
A book on the history of disputed elections in the United States, updated to reflect developments since publication of the first edition in 2016.
Readers of Common Ground Democracy may be interested to know that Oxford University Press has published an “updated and extended” edition of Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States. This revised edition contains a new chapter on Trump’s challenge to Biden’s victory in 2020, as well as a rewritten Introduction and Conclusion to reflect the significance of 2020 for understanding the nation’s experience with fights over the outcomes of elections. I’m gratified that the first edition was well-received, including being named as a Finalist for the Langum Prize in American History, and I hope that the new edition will be helpful to anyone seeking to understand the past in order to prepare for what might happen in this year’s election.
There is, moreover, a key connection between the topic that is the focus of Common Ground Democracy—the need to reform the structure of American elections in order to redress the problems of polarization and, specifically, the extent to which extremists gain power disproportionate to the preferences of American voters—and this new edition of Ballot Battles. In the immediate aftermath of the attack at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I determined that two essential changes were necessary to protect American democracy from the kind of extremist behavior exhibited that day. First was revision of the Electoral Count Act, the weaknesses of which were exploited by Trump and his supporters in their effort to prevent Congress from counting the electoral votes in favor of Biden. Fortunately, that reform has been accomplished, in the bipartisan bill shepherded through the Senate at the end of 2022 by Senators Susan Collins and Joe Manchin.
The other essential reform is the kind explored here on Common Ground Democracy: the development and adoption of election procedures that best reflect the will of the majority when the electorate is sharply divided among different groups, with significant strength on the populist right as well as significant strength on the progressive left, but with neither extreme capable of commanding a majority of the whole electorate, and yet the middle of the electorate (the “purple” voters) being significantly fewer in number than either hyper-polarized group at either end of the spectrum (deep blue or deep red).
While this type of structural reform (to have electoral outputs more aligned with electoral inputs) is not the focus of Ballot Battles, reading that book—especially its new content for the revised edition—will lead to a greater appreciation why this particular moment in U.S. history is unique, and more dangerous than what has occurred in the past (for example, over the presidential elections of 1876 and 2000), and thus why adopting the kind of structural reforms considered here at Common Ground Democracy is so urgent.