Give Americans the Right to Vote!

“Shoring Up the Right to Vote for President: A Modest Proposal” by Alexander Keyssar, in Political Science Quarterly (Summer 2003), 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 10115–1274.

Though attention soon shifted elsewhere in all the excitement at the close of the 2000 election, when Republicans in the Florida legislature threatened to select the state’s presidential electors, it came as a shock even to many knowledgeable observers that Amer­icans do not possess a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote for president. Article II, Section 1, of the Con­stitution leaves it up to each state’s legislature to decide how the state’s delegates to the Electoral College (which actually elects the president) shall be chosen. Keyssar, a historian at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, urges enactment of a constitutional amendment to remedy the defect.

Several constitutional amendments prevent states from denying people the right to vote on grounds such as race and sex, but none directly affirm the right itself. This omission is at odds with America’s “core political values” today, argues Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000).

In practice, of course, thanks to the 50 state legislatures, the vast majority of citizens now are able to vote in statewide elections for their state’s presidential electors. While it’s unlikely that a legislature would “legally hijack a presidential election” and thus touch off a “crisis of legitimacy,” Keyssar contends, the events of 2000 showed the need to make it impossible.