A Free Ballot and a Fair Count: The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of Voting Rights in the South, 1877-1893"A Free Ballot and a Fair Count" examines the efforts by the Department of Justice to implement the federal legislation passed by Congress in 1870 71 known as the Enforcement Acts. These laws were designed to enforce the voting rights guarantees for African Americans under the recently ratified Fifteenth Amendment. The Enforcement Acts set forth a range of federally enforceable crimes aimed at combating white southerners' attempts to deny or restrict