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Perhaps the truest test of a nation's ability govern itself democratically is its ability to count ballots fairly and accurately in competitive, high-stakes elections. Yet from the founding on, America's adherence to this ideal has been distinctly uneven. Edward Foley's Ballot Battles is a sweeping synthesis of the subject, tracing how election controversies evolved over time, from the 1780s to the present.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: The Missing Institution of Impartiality
- Introduction: Understanding the Past for the Sake of the Future
- Chapter One: Uncertain Vote-Counting in the Founding Era
- Chapter Two: The Novelty of Chief Executive Elections
- Chapter Three: The Entrenchment of Two-Party Competition
- Chapter Four: Counting Votes at Times of Crisis
- Chapter Five: Hayes-Tilden: To the Edge of the Constitutional Cliff
- Chapter Six: The Gilded Age: An Era of Hypercompetitive Elections
- Chapter Seven: The Progressive Era: Missed Opportunities at a Time of Reform
- Chapter Eight: America in the Middle of its Century: A Tarnished Ideal
- Chapter Nine: The Sixties and Their Legacy: The Rise of Democratic Expectations
- Chapter Ten: The Eighties and Nineties: Reemergence of Intensified Partisanship
- Chapter Eleven: Florida 2000: Avoiding a Return to the Constitutional Brink
- Chapter Twelve: After Bush v. Gore: Reinvigorated Demand for Electoral Fairness
- Conclusion: The Enduring Quest for a Fair Count
- Appendix
About the author
Edward B. Foley is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Law and Director of Election Law at The Ohio State University College of Law.
Summary
The 2000 presidential race resulted in the highest-profile ballot battle in over a century. But it is far from the only American election determined by a handful of votes and marred by claims of fraud. Since the founding of the nation, violence frequently erupted as the votes were being counted, and more than a few elections produced manifestly unfair results. Despite America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy, its adherence to the basic tenets of democratic elections-the ability to count ballots accurately and fairly even when the stakes are high-has always been shaky. A rigged gubernatorial election in New York in 1792 nearly ended in calls for another revolution, and an 1899 gubernatorial race even resulted in an assassination. Though acts of violence have decreased in frequency over the past century, fairness and accuracy in ballot counting nonetheless remains a basic problem in American political life.
In Ballot Battles, Edward Foley presents a sweeping history of election controversies in the United States, tracing how their evolution generated legal precedents that ultimately transformed how we determine who wins and who loses. While weaving a narrative spanning over two centuries, Foley repeatedly returns to an originating event: because the Founding Fathers despised parties and never envisioned the emergence of a party system, they wrote a constitution that did not provide clear solutions for high-stakes and highly-contested elections in which two parties could pool resources against one another. Moreover, in the American political system that actually developed, politicians are beholden to the parties which they represent - and elected officials have typically had an outsized say in determining the outcomes of extremely close elections that involve recounts. This underlying structural problem, more than anything else, explains why intense ballot battles that leave one side feeling aggrieved will continue to occur for the foreseeable future.
American democracy has improved dramatically over the last two centuries. But the same cannot be said for the ways in which we determine who wins the very close races. From the founding until today, there has been little progress toward fixing the problem. Indeed, supporters of John Jay in 1792 and opponents of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Texas Senate race would find it easy to commiserate with Al Gore after the 2000 election. Ballot Battles is not only the first full chronicle of contested elections in the US. It also provides a powerful explanation of why the American election system has been-and remains-so ineffective at deciding the tightest races in a way that all sides will agree is fair.
Additional text
Foley's examination of the most recent, and best known, ballot battle in 2000 bookends his study of the phenomena...Foley's view of the 2000 controversy may seem counter-intuitive to many, but his exhaustive scholarship and powerful argumentation mean that it is a view that should be taken seriously.
