ABSTRACT
The voting rights movement has become a rich arena for intellectual work in jurisprudence, intergovernmental relations and federalism, policy analysis, democratic theory, and the potentials and constraints of popular mobilization. The voting rights movement is primarily legalistic. It combines two distinct but parallel election issues: race discrimination and the parity of individual ballots. The race work is concerned with implementing the prohibition on discrimination in voting established by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The voting rights movement combines the race and reapportionment efforts so as to invoke the authority of federal courts to pass on the merits of complaints about local elections systems. Proportional representation devices aim to ensure an impact in elections proportionate to the diversity of voices in the voting population. Election politics contains numerous barriers to voter participation (including the voter registration requirement), thereby aggravating the difficulty of minorities mobilizing within their own communities. Powerful bipartisan alliances operate to protect these policies.
