Block the vote? The battle over ballots and the future of American democracy.
President Lyndon B. Johnson used 50 pens to sign the Voting Rights Act into law. Television footage of the Aug. 6, 1965, ceremony shows the president putting each to paper for a moment, scratching perhaps a half-letter, and then swapping the instrument out for new. When finished, he handed the pens to some of the famous figures gathered around him. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy got one. So did the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. So did civil rights activist and future member of Congress John Lewis.
Most pen recipients felt it was one of America’s finest hours. The law put federal muscle behind African Americans’ long struggle for equal voting booth access – and the political power that access bestowed. But Johnson’s own feelings that day were complicated. His daughter Luci Baines Johnson later told journalist Ari Berman, in an interview for his voting rights history “Give Us the Ballot,” that LBJ felt both victorious and afraid.
President Johnson knew he had just transformed the political structure of the nation, in ways both predictable and unforeseen. He could no longer control what would happen, the progress and the inevitable backlash, and how those might balance.
“It would be written in the history books. But now the history had to be made,” Ms. Johnson said.
Fifty-four years later, a renewed and intensifying struggle over ballot access and voting power is shaking the intricate structure of American democracy.
In the short run, the vote – who gets it, who doesn’t, what it’s worth – is almost certain to loom large in the 2020 elections. Top Democratic presidential contenders have all criticized recent GOP-led tightening of some state voting laws, claiming these changes are partly intended to make it harder for minorities to cast ballots.
“You’ve got Jim Crow sneaking back in,” said former Vice President Joe Biden in a speech in South Carolina on May 6, evoking the racial segregation laws of the past.
In the long run,
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