Who Gets to Vote?: A Conversation on Voter Suppression

Join the American Studies Program for a public discussion with nationally-recognized experts on voter suppression and voter participation in the United States.

Who gets to vote? And then, who does vote? These two questions are fundamental to any democracy. But given the shape of the 2016 presidential election cycle, and the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to roll back many provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the question of voter franchise takes on renewed importance this year.

Ari Berman, author of the Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015), a history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and a fellow at The Nation Institute.

Francis Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of twelve volumes, including the groundbreaking Why Americans Don’t Vote (1988) and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote (2002), and Suppressing the Black Vote (2009).

Zachary Roth, author of The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (2016), is a reporter for MSNBC and a widely published journalist.

Moderator: Christopher Dietrich, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, is also a 2016 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellows at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Please note: Thanks to the generosity of our speakers, a limited number of complimentary copies of their recent books will be available.

The American Studies CAMPAIGN 2016 series is made possible by the generous support of the Associate Vice President/Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of Fordham College Rose Hill; and the co-sponsorship support of the Center for Race, Law and Justice; the McGannon Communication Research Center; Latin American and Latino/a Studies Institute; the Department of Communication and Media Studies; and the Department of African and African-American Studies.