ICYMI: The Forgotten Constitutional Weapon Against Voter Restrictions

[Nevilledog]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/27/penalty-clause-voting-rights-00046973


It’s been a hard few years for people worried about voting rights in America. Republican-controlled states are imposing a raft of new restrictions. A divided Congress has failed to pass any legislation in response. And the Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case that could give state legislatures unchecked power over election rules.

But perhaps a largely forgotten provision of the Constitution offers a solution to safeguard American democracy. Created amid some of the country’s most violent clashes over voting rights, Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides a harsh penalty for any state where the right to vote is denied “or in any way abridged.”

A state that crosses the line would lose a percentage of its seats in the House of Representatives in proportion to how many voters it disenfranchises. If a state abridges voting rights for, say, 10 percent of its eligible voters, that state would lose 10 percent of its representatives — and with fewer House seats, it would get fewer votes in the Electoral College, too.

Under the so-called penalty clause, it doesn’t matter how a state abridges the right to vote, or even why. The framers of the constitutional amendment worried that they would not be able to predict all the creative ways that states would find to disenfranchise Black voters. They designed the clause so that they wouldn’t have to. “No matter what may be the ground of exclusion,” Sen. Jacob Howard, a Republican from Michigan, explained in 1866, “whether a want of education, a want of property, a want of color, or a want of anything else, it is sufficient that the person is excluded from the category of voters, and the State loses representation in proportion.”

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Kicking for visibility

[MagickMuffin]

2. Who will enforce this Penalty Clause?

There has to be someone to enforce this clause or the clause means nothing.

[progressoid]

7. Right. And even if someone had an airtight case, it would still go to the Supreme Court

And we know how things work out there.

[Inkey]

3. How would alternative state electorial votes

Fall into play ?
Disenfranchising wide swaths of state voters
choices in an election would really mess things
up for the states that pushed this option.

[KPN]

4. K+R.

Good to know.

[flying_wahini]

5. I'm already having anxiety about working the polls in the next election. (Texas here)

I’m gonna need something airtight to tell these MAGA cultists that won’t get me shot.

Not kidding.

[Nevilledog]

6. Tell them you're Republican

[summer_in_TX]

9. Unfortunately that's not likely to work.

Every polling location is supposed to have both Republican and Democratic poll workers. So they use partisan information in picking poll workers. The election judge is the party of the governor, so a Republican.

[Sky Jewels]

8. Can you say: "We have to be nonpartisan and neutral while we're on the job ...

so it's best for us to not make any political comments while people are voting."

And don't wear anything that's blue or red.

[flying_wahini]

10. I'm worried mostly about mean MAGAs that want to watch you at your elbow as you work.

Standing close to while I check people in. Arrrrggggg! I don’t want to argue with them.
I might lose it.

[Hekate]

11. I like this. How do we proceed?

[moondust]

12. Not enforced during Jim Crow?

Jelly bean jars, literacy tests, poll taxes, etc.?