ABSTRACT
This chapter asks the question of why the right to vote has come under attack in the neoliberal era. The question of the right to vote raises the larger question of meaningful political participation in lieu of an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse polity that cannot easily be quantified. The black civil rights movement demanded the unfettered right to vote as part of the movement's struggle for overall black civic inclusion. State and local elite whites have historically utilized the practice of racial gerrymandering to either deny or neutralize the black vote. Republicans viewed the Motor Voter Act as an explicit Democratic strategy to register more black voters. The potential of more black civic inclusion actually brought out more white voters in the 1994 elections and implementation of an elite white strategy of white-private deregulation.
