"In recent years, the Republican party, the Bush administration, and the conservative movement have made strategies to demobilize likely Democratic voters a key campaign tactic, even overshadowing the Republican efforts to mobilize the Republican party's base. From misinformation campaigns, new voter ID rules, and inordinately long lines at the polls to sloppy and inaccurate registration records and the abuse of felon disenfranchisement laws, party efforts to suppress voters have become the under-the-radar dynamic determining American elections. Keeping Down the Black Vote reveals that the effort to rig the system is not all that new. Party competition in America has frequently taken the form of blocking voters in the opposition, and race has often been at the heart of the game." "In this sharply argued new book, three of America's leading experts on party politics and elections revisit gripping stories of the rise of black voting power in the cities, including Harold Washington's historic bid for mayor of Chicago in 1983, and trace the voter suppression tactics that have been employed to counteract the contemporary mobilization of black voters across the nation over the last twenty-five years. Today, over forty years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 demolished bars to voting for African Americans, the effort to prevent black people - as well as Latinos and the poor in general - from voting is resurging. New tactics to suppress the vote are invented, and old tactics are revived, ironically usually under the mantle of "election reform." Despite the historic election of an African American president, the dynamics of vote suppression and the methods rooted in the encumbering system of electoral administration still exist." "With clear analysis of the methods of contemporary voter suppression, Keeping Down the Black Vote is a plea for a system of election administration that fosters the most basic right in a democracy - the right to vote."--Jacket.