My Constitution
My Denison University major was “self-designed”: a Bachelors of Arts in “American Political Studies”. Instead of the usual thirty-six hours or forty hours of classes (nine or ten classes) I had a whopping ninety hours in my major (I graduated in four years with 136 hours). I studied politics, American and world history, geography and sociology in preparation for a life in politics. And I even spent an entire semester in Washington DC taking courses and working in the Congress, and another whole semester as a professional campaigner.
I took that knowledge and ultimately decided against a political career. Instead, I taught Social Studies to middle school and high school kids for twenty-eight years. Everything I learned at Denison, and in a semester of Law School at the University of Cincinnati, and in earning a Masters of Education degree at Ashland University; was aimed at getting more knowledge to take into the classroom (and onto the athletic fields).
All of that to say that I am highly familiar with the Constitution of the United States. It’s not just something I learned in high school and college. It’s a document that I taught, year in-and-out, for two score and eight years.
Suffrage
I listen over and over to the claim by many Republicans that the 2020 election was somehow stolen. And even those Republicans who courageously stood against the former President and said it wasn’t, still support laws that would make it more difficult to vote. This all after the 2020 election, where more Americans voted than ever before, a full two-thirds of those eligible. And they voted in spite of the pandemic.
There are several Amendments impacting the “right to vote”. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to every race, and the 19th Amendment added every sex. The 23rd Amendment gave the citizens of Washington, DC the right to vote and the 24th prevented paying taxes to vote. The 26th lowered the voting age to eighteen.
Less directly, the 14th Amendment guarantees that every citizen is a citizen of their own state as well, with all the rights and privileges. Those rights and privileges cannot be taken away without due process of law, and they must be applied equally to all citizens. Certainly, one of those rights is the right to vote.
Electing the President
But when you look at how the President of the United States is chosen, the infamous “Electoral College”, there’s not a mention as to how states choose their electors. In the original Constitution, Article 2, section 1 states that the electors for President will be chosen in a process determined by the State’s legislature. When the process was re-written after the election of 1800, the 12th Amendment mentioned the electors of each state, but made no mention of how those electors are chosen.
So on that basis, perhaps the former President’s supporters aren’t wrong. If the Constitution doesn’t guarantee citizens the “right” to vote for Presidential electors, then the entire “Green Bay Sweep” plan of January 2021 might have been, legal. That plan and other actions tried to get Donald Trump re-elected even after the votes were counted . The goal was to get the state legislatures to ignore the counted vote of their state, and chose to give the electors to the candidate who lost instead of the one who won.
So, is there a part of the Constitution of the United States that guarantees a citizen’s right to vote for President of the United States?
Sort of.
The Twenty-Fourth
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned laws that forced voters to pay a fee (or tax) to cast their ballot. That was the purpose of the Amendment, ratified in 1964. It guarantees voting wouldn’t be restricted by an ability to pay. The actual amendment states:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
24th Amendment – US Constitution
The wording is clear. The 24th asserts that citizens have a “right” to vote for “…electors for President or Vice President”, and that right cannot be denied for failure to pay a tax. So if citizens have right to vote for electors, and it’s written into the US Constitution, then that means something.
It means an action of a State Legislature to take that right away would be un-Constitutional. Or that to encourage state legislatures to ignore the votes, the “will of the people”, would also be un-Constitutional. And while committing an un-Constitutional act is not (surprisingly) a crime, it definitely cannot have the force of law.
For an un-Constitutional act to be a crime, there must be “enabling legislation” passed with criminal penalties. The 18th Amendment banned intoxicating alcohol in the country, but it was a law passed by Congress, the Volstead Act, that prohibited its manufacture and sale, and created criminal penalties for doing so.
Law Debate
My Constitutional scholar friends will say, “But the 24th Amendment clearly is meant to ban poll taxes, not to guarantee a right to vote for Presidential electors”. But as we all know, the language of the Constitutional Amendments cannot be simply ignored, can it? I mean, look at the 2nd Amendment, which clearly defines that:
A well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of the free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
2nd Amendment – US Constitution
Does the 24th Amendment say you can take away the right to vote for Presidential electors for other reasons, just not by charging a tax to vote? That is not what the Amendment intended. The Amendment states as a right of citizens: the right to vote for Electors for President and Vice President. The State Legislatures cannot just ignore that, nor can the Federal Courts of the United States, and certainly not the US Congress.
Oh wait: the Courts have absolutely disconnected the “well-regulated militia” part from the “keep and bear arms” part of the 2nd Amendment. They have re-defined the “militia” as every able-bodied citizen. That “disarms” it from “modifying” the “right to bear”. But they don’t ignore it.
The 24th makes all of the different state actions to ignore the peoples’ votes, un-Constitutional. Voting for Presidential Electors is a Constitutional right; and it’s our right. It’s right there in black and white.
Now all we have to do is fight to keep it.
