You have to admire President
Bush's willingness to amend the Constitution over an issue of basic
principles. But before we forever deny millions of Americans the chance
to marry the persons they love, shouldn't we first pass an amendment
guaranteeing all of us the right to vote and the right to have those
votes counted?
You may think such a right already exists, but it doesn't. In fact,
among 119 electoral democracies in the world, the United States is one
of only 11 whose constitutions do not include the right to vote and to
be represented. This embarrassing national secret reflects our origins
as a slave republic in which votes were cast only by white male property
owners over 21. Universal suffrage was never on the agenda in
Philadelphia, and the founders left the tricky issue of voter
qualifications to state legislatures. Only gradually was the electorate
broadened in the years that followed, with anti-discrimination
amendments that prevent disenfranchisement based on race (the 15th),
gender (the 19th) and failure to pay a poll tax (the 24th).
But these incremental stabs at voting rights fall way short of
international standards requiring universal suffrage. Florida 2000 was
not a fluke but a vivid glimpse behind the scenes of a fragmented and
politically compromised system that, according to a Caltech and MIT
study, managed to lose the votes of more than 4 million Americans in
that election.
Florida highlighted several things: We have no uniform ballot for
national elections, but a free-for-all of local butterfly and
caterpillar ballots spawning confusion. We have no independent,
nonpartisan federal commission overseeing national elections, as Mexico
has, but rather partisan state officials doing the job, like Florida
Secretary of State Katharine Harris, who doubled as state chair of the
Bush campaign. We have no national voter
registration system, as more than 100 nations do, but rather state-based
systems subject to manipulation. So under the guise of centralizing
Florida's voter list, Harris contracted with a private company that
proceeded, under her direction, to wrongly purge more than 18,000
voters, most of them minorities, on the false grounds that they were
ex-felons. We don't even have a national ballot count or tally.
Florida laid bare the undemocratic structures that constrain our
politics. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered the counting of 175,000
ballots that did not register on the punch-card machines, Republican
legislative leaders threatened to disregard the popular vote and choose
their own electors. This threat startled much of the nation. But, in
Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court quickly recorded that they were acting
within their powers under Article II ("Each state shall appoint,
such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors
.").
By
defining voting as a state-conferred privilege rather than the
people's inalienable right, the Constitution leaves millions
outside the representative structure.
In Washington, D.C., for instance, 570,898 citizens have no
representative in the Senate or the House with voting privileges
- even though they pay, proportionately, more federal taxes than
people in every state but Connecticut and even though Washington
residents have fought in every war since the Revolution. Their
disenfranchisement is unique among the world's capital city
residents. But the Supreme Court rejected a district voting
rights challenge in 2000 on the grounds that Washingtonians are
not state residents.
In all, there are more than 8 million disenfranchised U.S.
citizens, a population larger than the populations of Wyoming,
Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Delaware,
Maine and Nebraska combined.
About 4.1 million of these people live in the territories -
mostly Puerto Rico, but also Guam, American Samoa and the U.S.
Virgin Islands. These citizens have no voting representation in
Congress and cannot vote for president, which, in the case of
Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court
of Appeals, "is the cause of immense resentment."
On the mainland, especially in the Deep South, many states
supervise an increasingly controversial internal political
colony. More than 3.9 million citizens, 2% of the country's
eligible voting population, are disenfranchised because of
felony convictions. More than one-third of these people have
done their time but have nonetheless lost their right to vote
forever. The policy is not uniform; different states handle it
in different ways.
Such political punishment is a tactic not of individual
rehabilitation but of mass electoral suppression. The ex-felon
group is disproportionately poor, minority and, probably,
Democratic. In the 2000 election, which was clinched by a little
more than 500 votes, Florida had disenfranchised more than
600,000 citizens for their felony convictions. Florida takes the
position that ex-felons can never get their voting rights back.
Other national supreme courts, such as Canada's, have overturned
similar laws, invoking universal suffrage provisions in their
constitutions.
Around the world, almost all electoral democracies have written
positive suffrage guarantees into their constitutions. What
about us, the super-democracy that spends billions promoting
elections abroad? Before we take up the idea of "one man,
one woman," how about dusting off "one person, one
vote"?
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