I’ll keep my point brief for now, I’ll follow up after the election with my complete argument. We need a Voting Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Or perhaps several. It should be apparent to everyone that our election “system” has gone haywire and is untenable. We can’t keep having elections like this.
We can’t leave it to “Originalist” and “Constructionist” judges to be helpful or to rule even-handedly in this matter. These are the reasons why:
1) the popular vote was hardly a political theory when the US Constitution was written.
2) Right of the people to vote appears nowhere in the original USC.
3) The first mention of the R2V is in 15th Amendment, which orders states to treat people equally in regard to their voting rights.
4) This is strange because there’s nothing in the USC that says the states even have to hold popular elections.
Yet perhaps most telling:
5) the Founders disdained the very theory of the popular vote.
The Founders themselves were not democratic people. They were oligarchs. The first elections for president show no nationwide popular vote totals because there weren’t any. It was all done by the Electoral College. What’s more, in 1789, only 6% of the white male population were allowed to vote on anything, and white males were the only people who had a possibility of voting.
This means that almost no guidance about voting exists to be culled from The Founders writings. The original intent was away from, not toward, granting a popular right to vote. The country then evolved in the opposite direction.
Yet, the Constitution isn’t written with that in mind. Therefore, the R2V defaults to one of those mysterious rights covered in the 10th Amendment, which grants it to “the states—or to the people respectively.” This is the reason why the federal courts mostly defer to the states to administer elections, except when equality is an issue, possibly.
Now, however, as opposite parties hold the states’ executive, legislative branches, and judicial branches, and sometimes different parties hold the different offices within the executive section. The courts have to rule on what parts of the state governments are in charge. The results have been a mess of litigation and last-minute rule-changes affecting some states but not others.
This causes the chaos that we’re in. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the problems in our voting system. The only out of this, the only way to resolve the issues is at the source: by amending our country’s founding document.
If the Founders have little or nothing to say to the judges and justices we depend on for final rulings, we must give the judicial branch something that better defines the Right to Vote. The SCOTUS has shown that a Voting Rights Act is too easily tossed aside. We need to escalate this: seek to pass (at least one) Voting Rights Amendment.