A necessary book for all ages, this lays out how the system is rigged and unfair in an easily understood manner. I hope that this makes its way into the hands of the young, because ultimately it is them who will make the necessary changes. If it's banned in your district, I encourage you to purchase it for yourself and for a little free library where young adults may easily access it.

Highly recommend for young adult collections. Great writing and format that will appeal to both young adults and even adults who prefer easier to read formats.

A very good book for YA readers to help them learn about understand voting. A great way to teach about sufferage and how people of color are often blocked from voting.

This is the perfect book to be reading right now amidst the #blacklivesmatter movement. Takes a deeper look into systemic racism and how certain voters are oppressed through this system, thereby making election results invalid. I found the writing a little stale, but this is an important educational text.

This book is now required reading in my high school U.S. government classes. Being aware of the history of voter suppression in the United States has never been more important than it is now; the best weapon against voter suppression is information, and this book delivers. It's heartbreaking but essential.

Let me just start out by saying, in our current political landscape, this should be required reading. Our democracy as it was always intended, is under relentless attack. This book chronicles a long history of voter suppression. Republican representation, increasingly unhappy with the diversity blooming across the country, started to come up with increasingly savvy ways to disenfranchise the colored vote. The information chronicled within these pages is both horrific and shocking. It is perhaps only through being informed and motivated to get out the vote that we can ever hope to break the vicious cycle of suppression and under representation. The information is easy to read and understand, and is very user friendly. The more people who read and absorb the facts in these pages, the better off we will all be. Thank you Netgalley for the early copy.

One Person, No Vote (YA edition) by Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden is a timely read. As we approach a presidential election in the US, this provides some insight for young adults. Adults will also find the information interesting.. I recommend this title.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Disclaimer: I received this as an eARC via NetGalley in partnership with the publisher, for a fair and unbiased review.
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I appreciated the wealth of information and detail included in this book. It draws on everything that makes voters annoyed with the duty of being an active voter, and does a tremendous job of pointing out the pitfalls and loopholes that exist between state and federal election legislation.

There were only two things that irked me: the structure and lack of citations. I pined for chronological order, and felt that even when some of the chapters seemed to be in chronological order, a statement or situation would seem to throw off the timeline. It was almost like following someone's thought pattern as they laid out the information they knew about the topic(s). The author cites/references her sources every now and again, but not fully; I would think that especially given that this is a YA copy (likely to be referenced by students) it should include them.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2966986944

Well researched and well written, but makes you want to hit your head against the wall because the information is so infuriating.

The Young Adult rewrite of Anderson and Bolden’s award-winning One Person, No Vote never justifies its existence. Read the original instead.

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Who is this book for?

It’s a necessary question for nonfiction, especially nonfiction packaged for a specific audience. And it’s a question I kept returning to throughout my read of the Young Adult adaption of the award-winning One Person, No Vote from critically-acclaimed academics Carol Anderson and Tonya Bolden.

It’s fairly easy to tell who the original is for. With its forward by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and references to “the resistance” in the cover copy, One Person, No Vote is clear about being targeted towards readers already inclined to agree with the thesis.

Despite the blue packaging, however, it’s still an accessible and useful book for readers anywhere on the political spectrum. Its academic rigor makes that possible. The book is clear about the argument it’s making, then methodically lays out support and evidence. The result is possibly the best single resource on the belief that, as the cover proclaims, “voter suppression is ruining our democracy.”

That’s why the book still found respect outside the left-leaning academic circles it was written to sell to. It’s an honest, thoughtful argument grounded in historical context and contemporary evidence. It tells you what it seeks to persuade you of, then does a great job of it.

So, now that One Person, No Vote has been given a teen-focused rewrite, we ask the question again: who is this book for?

In this case, the answer is a little less clear.

It’s obvious, you might say. It’s right there on the cover. This book is for all the same kinds of people that would read the original, just younger.

There’s certainly something to that idea. In the YA version, on the paragraph level, the reading level is dropped almost insultingly low.

I opened both ebooks side-by-side to get a sense for what kind of sentence-level changes were made, and the result was at turns frustrating and hilarious.

Take a look at this paragraph from the introduction of the original:

[SCREENCAP: One Person, No Vote ebook]

In the YA version (and this is the ARC, so all quotes are potentially subject to change), that paragraph becomes:

[SCREENCAP: YA version]

Those paragraphs are pretty typical for the way the whole book was rewritten.

It’s not the decline in detail that I find interesting. Fewer specific quotes and references are understandable–a YA version should be more streamlined. Plus, just because references are gone from one paragraph doesn’t mean they won’t appear later.

It’s not even the changed facts that I’m stuck by. Yes, there’s a big difference between 7 and 17 percent, but as this is an ARC, I can’t be sure that isn’t a typo.

No, I’m interested in the tremendous simplification of the prose. “Moreover” becomes “what’s more.” “It is true that” becomes “yes.” Phrases like “sea change” eliminated altogether.

The difference in prose complexity was much greater than I anticipated, given that the original is neither antiquated nor particularly difficult. And that concerns me.

If a reader isn’t ready for the language used in the original, they’re probably not ready to read the book critically. One Person, No Vote is not a difficult book to read, given the type. If a reader needs “moreover” to be changed to “what’s more” for the book to be accessible, how do Anderson and Bolden expect them to indipendentally evaluate the argument?

The answer, of course, is simple: they don’t. They aren’t expecting young readers to approach their work critically, and they’re okay with that.

Let’s look at the lines that follow the excerpts above. In the original, after outlining the ongoing presence of voter suppression, they write: “One Person, No Vote seeks to change that.” It’s a succinct line that cues the reader to what they’re about to read: a very specific argument with an activist goal. The authors want to show you that a particular problem exists, then encourage you to do something about it.

That same sentence in the YA version has changed drastically:

[SCREENCAP: YA version]

In this version, the book is a “story.” A “history.” It isn’t a specific point of view, and it certainly doesn’t represent a specific agenda. No, it’s simply the facts.

The biggest change made in this adaption isn’t on the language level. It’s in One Person, No Vote‘s concerted effort to repackage itself as a textbook rather than an academic thesis.

The authors are counting on readers–those readers who supposedly can’t handle “moreover”–to not understand what they’re reading. To buy the book’s constant assertions that it represents an irrefutable observation, not an argument that demands evidence.

It is for these readers, it seems, that this adaption was written. Readers who aren’t prepared to evaluate sources on their own and are looking for books to tell them what to believe.

Readers who won’t notice, for instance, the awkward acrobatics the authors perform to argue that voter suppression is a uniquely Republican phenomenon. Even in the chapter called “Only Democrats Need Apply,” the authors go to great lengths to attribute shady actions to “representatives” and “states,” not “Democrats” or “the Democratic Party.” This hesitation, of course, disappears in the latter half of the book, when not only actions but nefarious motivations as well are attributed by name to the GOP.

My biggest problem isn’t that those holes in the argument exist. The scars thing is that Anderson and Bolden don’t want readers who will notice them.

The original version of One Person, One Vote is perfectly accessible to a well-read, politically engaged teen. The academic language serves as an important cue for young readers that they need to bring a thoughtful, critical eye to the book. The YA adaption removes those cues, pretending that this kind of book can and should be read by credulous, inexperienced teens as some sort of bible.

In trying to get another bite of the apple, selling the same book a second time, Anderson and Bolden undermine their original work. Without the confidence that their work can (and should) be expected to stand up to scrutiny, this book becomes flimsy and ultimately useless.

This book enraged me, and not because of the writing or the authors but the history behind voter suppression in the United States. The authors do an extremely good job of presenting the facts and history of different suppression tactics that has been used up until today, and I found that it completed my knowledge on some topics. E.g. I know the voter purges are bad, but exactly why are they bad? How does voter ID laws affect turnout? What laws have been attempted to remedy these issues?

Unfortunately, I feel that those who would benefit the most from reading this would instead turn their nose at it. Someone may take this as a politically aimed book because there are a lot of facts and references to a certain political party, but if you’re part of the crowd identified, you’re a part of the problem and need to advocate for change for your fellow Americans.

As someone with a family that has an extremely long history starting from before the United States was a country, I found this to be extremely troubling that this is how we treat our fellow citizens. I would suggest everyone to read this, voting age or not.