Law Commons^™

Three Questions For The Right To Vote Amendment, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Should the United States Constitution be amended to guarantee the right to vote? To the average citizen – and probably many lawyers – this almost certainly would be taken as an absurd question. Most people probably assume that the right to vote is, at least in principle, already guaranteed by the Constitution even if our practices fall short of our ideals. But, in fact, although the Constitution frequently refers to the “right … to vote” – and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has long treated voting as a fundamental right – the right to vote per se is nowhere guaranteed. A …