Anderson has a gift for illustrating how specific historical injustices have repercussive, detrimental influence on contemporary American life ... Throughout One Person, Anderson’s tone, at turns urgent and indignant, seems to arise from the ease with which she can document abundantly—via investigative journalism, popular history and historical scholarship—the GOP’s determined efforts 'to purge American citizens and cull and homogenize the electorate.' The book’s final chapter is called The Resistance and that is likely our only recourse: To sustain American democracy, we must collectively resist state-run purges of legal voters. Anderson knows this, hammering her overarching claim through quotation of Abraham Lincoln: 'I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.'
One Person, No Vote reads like a speedy sequel of sorts to her previous book ... Her new book seems to have been written from a state of emergency, in an adrenaline-fueled sprint. Anderson is a stinging polemicist ... this trenchant little book will push you to think not just about the vote count but about who counts, too.
Indeed, her description of the perpetual war that blacks and now Latinos have fought to get and keep the right to vote is impeccably researched, deftly written and, sadly, prescient. What made me want to holler were the reams of evidence Anderson presents to prove an irrefutable point: Since Reconstruction, conservative whites have tried to strip minorities of their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, by any means necessary. ... One Person, No Vote is slim...but it punches above its weight, like a lecture from a professor with superb command of language. Anderson’s storytelling shines ... the book reminded me of the classic anti-establishment expression: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
With exhaustive research and documentation and compelling narrative style, Anderson conveys how the overtly racist poll taxes, literacy tests, targeted violence and intimidation that evolved after Reconstruction to prevent African-Americans and other minorities from voting have been supplanted by ostensibly colorblind efforts to fight voter fraud and game the electoral system ... Fortunately, Anderson’s lesson on the past and present of voter suppression is also accompanied by hope for the future. She gives credit to the many people and organizations working to protect voting rights and help citizens vote, encouraging anyone who reads One Person, No Vote to join in that work and to vote themselves, in spite of the disillusionment that the present state of the electoral process might instill.
Blood-boiling stories...come rapid-fire in Anderson’s narrative, which is also peppered with a brief history of voter suppression dating back to Reconstruction. (When it comes to white people trying to prevent black people from voting, there’s really nothing new under the sun.) She ends on an optimistic note, however ... But, ultimately, her book is unsatisfying, even maddening. In large part, that’s because it’s mostly a clip job of the sort often put out by conservative authors ... Anderson appears to have conducted few or no original interviews that might have fleshed out some of her arguments ... That said, Anderson’s work still provides value in simply connecting the dots, properly situating the seemingly disparate attacks on minority voting as part of a long-running trend of white people trying to maintain their grip on power by whatever means necessary.
With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, many Americans (except African Americans and Latinos) believed that the voting rights fight was over—taken care of, time to move on. Democracy won. Next. But as Carol Anderson demonstrates in her powerful new book, One Person, No Vote, the right to vote—a central tenet of our democracy—is under threat ... Her book drills down into how the right to vote is being slowly erased with too few of us noticing ... One Person, No Vote is an important sequel to Anderson’s White Rage, which examined the nefarious ways white America sought to oppress, repress and marginalize African Americans after the Civil War ... While Anderson notes some progress in battling voter suppression, she remains clear-sighted about the continuing dangers. She decries the ways voter suppression skews the electorate and the resulting consequences to our democracy.
One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson does an incredible job by showing the immediate relevance to the election of Donald Trump, then takes it all the way back to the Jim Crow South where the Democratic former slave owners and other white folks who openly vowed to keep African Americans in their place, which was most certainly not as a voter ... One Person, No Vote should be sent to the offices of every politician in Congress, and every state legislature to remind them and warn them of the breadth of how much damage this programs and crooked politicians have already done. Everything you need to arm yourself and others against losing your Constitutionally protected right is in the book. Read it, read it again, then take action.
The notion of voter fraud is itself a fraud perpetrated on the American voting public ... Anderson examines the treacherous machinations of a government actively working to exclude voters based on undisguised racial profiling. This a whiplash-inducing chronicle of how a nation that just a few short years ago elected its first black president now finds itself in the throes of a deceitful and craven effort to rip this most essential of American rights from millions of its citizens.
As Anderson shows, they realize that voter fraud is essentially nonexistent in most locales, but they spread misinformation about the pervasive problem to defeat court challenges ... Many opponents of more accessible voting practices distinguish artificially between race-based gerrymandering and purely political gerrymandering of legislative districts, but the author offers persuasive evidence that both forms primarily target people of color ... Anderson is a highly praised academic who has mastered the art of gathering information and writing for a general readership, and her latest book could not be more timely.
