Give Us the Ballot Podcast

The Voting Rights Act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. The historic march from Selma to Montgomery, grassroots demonstrations across the South, and legislative pressures in both Congress and the courts radically transformed American politics. And yet fifty years later we're still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power.

As chronicled in Ari Berman's new book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, we're at an alarming moment in history when lawmakers are being criticized for devising new strategies to keep certain communities out of the voting booth. In such a political climate, on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision overturning a key part of the Voting Rights Act, is there a new struggle for voting rights in America, or is a decades-long fight still unresolved? What will these tensions mean for the U.S. campaign system and an already hotly contested 2016 presidential race?