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Ballot Battles - The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Hardcover)
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Ballot Battles - The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Hardcover)
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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.
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