Daily Kos directed me to this article at the Nation, in which John Nichols, of that illustrious publication, proposes that we enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. The proposed text of the Amendment:
“SECTION 1: Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.
“SECTION 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.”
A constitutional amendment of this sort will never pass, as I’m sure Nichols knows. The 13th through 15th Amendments were only ratified by the Southern states because doing so was the price of re-entering the Union (and Mississippi avoided ratifying the 13th until a few years ago). Moreover, the Amendment as written wouldn’t work, due to Section 2. Congress already, for instance, has the power to overturn the Supreme Court’s lawless neutering of the Voting Rights Act, but it hasn’t and it won’t.
But, since we’re in the realm of fantasy here, let me suggest the proper way to go about this. This is not original with me, by the way. I got it from General Sherman, though I can’t find a link to verify my recollection from my reading many years ago. I don’t recall that he mentioned the three fifths rule, but his suggestion for guaranteeing the right to vote to Southern blacks represented something of an inversion of that rule. He proposed that representation in Congress (as well, of course, as electoral votes), be allocated by the number of registered voters rather than the number of people. I think that’s how he put it, but I’d go further. Representation should be determined by the number of people who actually vote in Presidential election years. If a state wants to suppress the vote, it would pay by reduced clout in Congress and a reduced role in the Presidential election. Such an amendment would give states a positive incentive to encourage everyone to vote and to make it easy to vote. Sure, there might be ways to game this system, but you could game it out beforehand and prevent the more obvious sort of stuff. While we’re at it, might as well put something in there about gerrymandering.
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