Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Steve Holt

If there’s one thing Christine Slaughter and Max Palmer want their students to know about voting rights, it’s that they’re complicated—and progress is rarely linear. “As a country, we tell this nice, neat story about how [voting] started out really restricted and then gradually got better,” says Palmer, an associate professor of political science and associate chair of the department. “That’s not at all the case.” In reality, voting procedures vary from state to state, and the history of voting rights includes both progress and setbacks.

Palmer and Slaughter, an assistant professor of political science, study who participates in the political process, and why. In a new course they’re coteaching this spring—Voting Rights (PO 336), BU’s first undergraduate course on the subject—the pair cover voting rights’ complex history. For example, they point out that while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a significant victory for voters of color, it took years for the federal law to be fully implemented in every state and locality. And after record-high levels of Black turnout in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Supreme Court gutted many of the Voting Rights Act’s protections in its landmark 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder. In many states, policies enacted following the Shelby decision have made voting harder in communities of color.

“At every turn where there’s progress, there’s retrenchment,” Slaughter says. “It’s a complicated thing to ask, ‘Where have we seen progress?’ when the goalposts around who can participate are constantly being challenged legally and through informal practices.” In a presidential election year, with several legal challenges to voting practices pending in the courts, the lessons being taught in the new course are perfectly timed—lessons Slaughter and Palmer hope their students will carry into policies they shape and campaigns they lead down the road.

Who shows up, and why

Palmer and Slaughter research voting rights from different, but complementary perspectives. Palmer’s research into election turnout includes looking at the institutional barriers that keep voters away from the polls. He’s found, for instance, that Americans without access to a vehicle are roughly half as likely to vote in person as those with a ride. Palmer also studies redistricting, which is the process lawmakers use to redraw voting maps based on updated census data—a process called gerrymandering when it’s used to advantage the political party in power. 

“What does it mean when one party is going to control your legislature no matter what happens in the election?” Palmer says. “That’s not responsive government, that’s not effective government, that’s not real representation.”

Slaughter studies voting patterns with a political psychology lens. A key finding of hers is that minoritized groups continue to participate in the political process, despite barriers that make voting and participating in other ways difficult. 

“When we see things such as longer wait times for African Americans, when we see requests for photo identification, these different practices making it more difficult to vote, how do we understand why voters persist and engage in politics—despite these obstacles and barriers?” Slaughter asks. For some Black women, the answer to that question might be hope. Slaughter’s research has shown that Black women who are generally optimistic about the future of the country participate in politics at a higher rate than those who are not as hopeful.

More than an election year issue

News and conversations about voting rights understandably tick up during presidential election years. But Slaughter insists we not relegate it to something we bring up every four years. 

“There are many things—school board elections, city council elections, redistricting—that happen outside of the presidential election and general primary window,” Slaughter says. 

Thinking about when and where the right to vote has been exercised, and where it may have been infringed upon, needs to happen more than once every four years, Slaughter says. State and local governments implement elections—not the federal government—and the right to vote is not explicitly enshrined in the Constitution. Several states are still redrawing electoral district lines based on 2020 US Census data, a process Palmer says is often partisan. In states where one party controls the legislature, redistricting is sometimes used to stack the deck against the opposing party. In 2018, for example, Republican candidates for the Wisconsin State Assembly won only 45 percent of the statewide vote but, due to partisan gerrymandering, won 64 percent of the seats. Palmer and his coauthors have proposed a potential solution, which involves dividing redistricting into a two-stage process where each party controls one stage, and could result in fairer maps. Heading into the presidential election, Palmer says his eyes are also on the states where courts may rule on the legality of new electoral maps. Notably, federal courts in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana sent electoral maps that disenfranchised Black voters back to the legislatures to be redrawn, while the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of a racial gerrymander in South Carolina.

Slaughter says she’ll be looking at voter turnout and experience among communities of color in 2024, especially in places like Texas, where Republican leadership has closed hundreds of polling locations and added identification requirements in the last decade, both of which disproportionately affect Black and Latino voters. “This will be the third presidential election where we don’t have the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, specifically the Section 4(b) coverage formula,” she says, referring to the portion of the act ruled unconstitutional in the Shelby decision. “How will we see minority voters participate in the election?”

Charting a new course

Each week, with Slaughter and Palmer as their guides, 27 undergraduate students chew on questions like these in PO 336. Palmer says he’s wanted to teach a course on voting rights for several years, but only now has the room in his schedule and the right coinstructor with whom to partner. Where Palmer’s research has focused on the laws and institutions that define electoral politics, Slaughter—who joined the CAS faculty in 2022—brings a behavioral lens to the subject. The first part of the term was spent reviewing the history of voting rights, including the struggles of women, immigrants, Hispanics, Native American, and Black voters. The course will conclude with a study of contemporary laws and issues related to voting.

“We want courses in our department that are relevant to what’s happening in the world today,” Slaughter says. “We want to equip our students with the skill set not only to see the legal and institutional contours of voting rights but also the behavioral aspect. Students are interested in political organizing, working for campaigns, or running for office themselves, and we want them to understand who you see show up on election day is not just who wanted to show up.”