**DO AMERICANS HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE?**

By Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (D-IL-2)

Monday, August 9, 2004

Just below the political radar there\'s a basic democratic question
being discussed or fiercely debated among academics, civil rights
leaders and politicians from both political parties. The question? Is
the *individual right to vote* guaranteed in our Constitution?

*Bush v. Gore* (2000) said, \"the individual citizen has no federal
constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the
United States.\" Thus, the simple answer appears to be \"no.\"

Others, Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe among them, argue that
the \"equal protection\" and \"non-discrimination in voting\" clauses of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Supreme Court precedents
since *Brown* (1954), can be construed to grant the individual citizen
the fundamental right to vote in the Constitution.

On July 1, during a Q & A session at the RainbowPUSH Coalition
Convention in Chicago, former President Bill Clinton, after careful
questioning, acknowledged, constitutionally, we have a voting system
largely based on \"states\' rights\" and he supported adding an
individual voting rights amendment to the Constitution.

August 6, at the UNITY: Journalists of Color Convention, Roland Martin
asked President George W. Bush: \"In your remarks you said that 8
million people in Afghanistan registered to vote, and as you said,
exercised their God-given right to vote\...That may be a right from God,
but it\'s not guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution\...And in this age of
new constitutional amendments, will you endorse a constitutional
amendment guaranteeing every American the right to vote in federal
elections?\" President Bush responded: \"I\'ll consider it.\"

In light of the fact that the current Constitution allows state
legislatures, not individual voters, to select electors to elect the
President through the Electoral College - as Florida\'s legislature
threatened to do in 2000 if Gore had won the most popular votes - it
would be wise for Democrats, Kerry-Edwards, indeed, anyone who believes
in democracy, to see the value of adding an individual voting rights
amendment to the Constitution and no longer allow \"states\' rights\"
almost absolute control over our election process.

I\'m *convinced* that if Congress had the will, under our current
Constitution, it could do much more to strengthen the administration of
a unitary voting system, and protect and fully count all votes. Most
Americans are unaware, however, that, nationally, according to a joint
study by Cal-Tech and MIT, somewhere between four and six million votes
were not counted in 2000 because many states had similar problems to
what occurred in Florida. My state of Illinois was the worst.

But I\'m *unconvinced,* absent a voting rights amendment, that any
solutions to our most pressing voting rights problems will be universal
or sustainable. How can we achieve equal protection in 13,000 separate
and unequally administered voting jurisdictions?

For example, I was born in South Carolina, raised in Illinois and went
to college in North Carolina. While a resident in each of those states,
the simple fact that I\'m an American entitled me to representation by
two Senators and a Representative. However, while working in Congress I
live in DC where *American citizens* - with the same obligation to pay
taxes and willingness to fight and die in defense of our nation -
experience taxation without voting representation in Congress. They are
*equal* American citizens in obligation but treated *unequally*
politically. They\'ve tried political enfranchisement through a
constitutional amendment, an \"equal protection\" lawsuit, and statehood
through the Congress, only to be rejected. An individual voting rights
amendment would give them equal citizenship status and entitle them to
equal representation in Congress.

Most Americans are aware that in 2000 Florida removed over 50,000 voters
claiming, erroneously, they were ex-felons. Florida recently tried the
same stunt again. Nationally, nearly five million ex-felons, who have
fully paid their debt to society, are permanently barred from voting. As
a legacy of slavery, such laws are disproportionately in the South where
fifty-three percent of African Americans live. Only a voting rights
amendment can overcome many states determination to exclude them.

Without an individual voting rights amendment, any law Congress passed
would only apply to federal elections, not state and local elections.

And if the individual right to vote is already in the Constitution, why
didn\'t it take precedent over Florida\'s arbitrary December 12 deadline
to count all the votes? In my view, constitutionally, states\' rights
overruled the individual\'s right to have their vote counted.

Finally, wouldn\'t individual voting rights be stronger and more secure
if the right to vote was *explicitly* in the Constitution rather than
*implicitly construed* to be there?

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