I am very pleased to welcome to ELB Book Corner several contributors to The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law (Eugene D. Mazo ed. 2024). The 30% discount code for ELB readers is ALAUTHC4. The first contribution is from Anthony Gaughan:

When courts consult history for guidance in election law cases, judges and litigants usually focus on three time periods: the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, the adoption of the First Amendment in 1791, and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. But many of the most important attributes of twenty-first century American election law trace back to election practices that predated the Constitution. During the 180 years between the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607 and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, American elections developed distinctive features that can still be found in state and federal elections in the United States. 

Elections in colonial America took place on the periphery of the British Empire. The American colonies represented the crown jewel of Britain’s overseas empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But as subjects of the British crown, American colonists lacked political independence. The colonies did not even elect representatives to Parliament. Nevertheless, to a remarkable extent, voting and elections became a vital part of life in the American colonies. By the time of the imperial crisis in the 1760s and 1770s, the concept of self-government was deeply rooted in American political culture.   

A remarkable variety of voting systems characterized colonial and Revolutionary elections. The 3,000 miles of ocean that separated Britain from its American colonies—and the hundreds of miles of coastline that separated the colonies from one another—promoted the development of unique and diverse election features. Colonial legislatures developed a wide range of approaches to voter and candidate qualifications, voting methods, election scheduling, term lengths, and a host of other election laws and procedures. The decentralized nature of colonial elections remains a central feature of American election law.    

Nevertheless, some common themes emerged in early American elections. The voting process matured rapidly in the eighteenth century. Election rules and voting innovations that took hold in one colony often spread to others. Most important of all, the Americans developed a concept of representation that diverged sharply with that of the mother country. By the time the colonists declared their independence from Britain in 1776, a distinctively American approach to voting and elections had emerged in North America.

The evolution of colonial voting practices coincided with the maturation of American political culture. From primitive beginnings in the early 1600s, colonial elections grew to become a distinguishing feature of American life. Voter participation in the colonies exceeded that of any other country in the world in the eighteenth century, including Britain itself. The extraordinary diversity of colonial election laws reflected the independent and innovative nature of eighteenth century American political culture. At the same time, colonial elections fell far short of modern conceptions of democracy. Only a minority of the colonial population—adult white men of property or wealth—possessed suffrage rights. Nevertheless, colonial elections established patterns of local control that endure to the present day. In the centuries after 1776, American democracy expanded to include all adult citizens regardless of race, religion, or gender. But the colonial era’s emphasis on election administration by local officials has remained deeply entrenched in the nation’s political culture. In developing election rules that suited their local conditions, colonists showed an extraordinary confidence in their capacity for self-government. As the American Revolution demonstrated, the British government did not grasp until too late how profoundly colonial political culture had diverged from the political culture of eighteenth century England.