Editor’s Opinion: Why Americans Deserve a Constitutional Right to Vote for Presidential Electors

Autor: Demetrios Caraley
Rok vydání: 2001
Předmět:
Zdroj: Political Science Quarterly. 116:1-3
ISSN: 1538-165X
0032-3195
DOI: 10.2307/2657817
Popis: Americans deserve the constitutional right to vote for president. We do not have it now. Last year's presidential election showed that our Constitution should be amended to declare explicitly that every citizen of requisite age has a constitutional right to vote for presidential electors and that the popular vote in each state determines the allocation of electoral votes. This kind of amendment would retain the electoral vote system of choosing the president and not alter the balance of power between large and small states, among regions, or between parties. Political scientists, constitutional law experts, and other careful readers were stunned to read in the U.S. Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore majority opinion the declaration that "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for President unless and until the state legislature chooses statewide election. "1 All of us knew that was literally true in the original 1787 constitutional language. But the actuality since Andrew Jackson's day was that state legislatures had enfranchised essentially all white, adult, male citizens to vote for presidential electors.2 Then various constitutional amendments prohibited discrimination in voting on the basis of race, gender, or age above eighteen. Most Americans who even thought about it thus assumed that the long-term de facto right to vote for presidential electors had become through custom and tradition a de jure right and was sufficient to make our
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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