Sam Issacharoff has an important new review of Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot in the latest issue of The American Prospect. Unfortunately it is not posted freely online. It concludes:

Using the instrumentalities of power to keep enemies from voting is deeply wrong; no game can allow the players to manipulate the rules. The sources of the politics of voter exclusion are complicated, but they begin with the unique American institution of partisan control of the electoral process. For Berman, the partisan dimension can be quickly overcome by invoking race and the glorious history of the Voting Rights Act, which keeps the moral arc of the story neat. But the simple tale here obscures the deep partisan stakes in matters of claimed  voter fraud and voter suppression.

The warm reception of Berman’s book is a tribute to his craftsmanship in the telling of a great story. But it also reflects the allure of a simple world of moral absolutes. Placing everything in the context of race and then focusing on an evil, anti-democratic cabal diminishes what we can learn from history. As Columbia law professor Jamal Greene writes, “A Voting Rights Act for the 21st century would recognize that racial discrimination may be our original sin, but it is not our only one.” The precision of the Voting Rights Act in targeting certain practices in a certain place and time proved its great strength and its later constitutional vulnerability. Because it worked so well, the Voting Rights Act as created in 1965 exposed the need for a broader legal commitment to the right to vote, one not limited by geography or even by race.

I raised similar “race or party” concerns in connection with Berman’s book in this Slate piece and in my ELB Podcast interview with him.