What The Constitution REALLY Says About Voting Rights

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what you need to know about the legal wars that are happening right now. The Supreme Court's blockbuster ruling in Louisiana versus Calais, the Save Act fight in the Senate. The Constitution isn't a bumper sticker. It actually is a bunch of words that mean things, so let's actually look at what's in it. So go look for the right to vote in the original Constitution of 1787, and you will see that there is no such thing. It is not there. There is no clause that says every citizen shall have the right to vote. That is not an oversight. James Madison didn't forget. Here's what the document actually says. Article 1, Section 2 says, quote, members of the House are chosen by the people of the several states, and the voters shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature. So here is the translation. Whatever your state says you have to do to vote for the state legislature, that's who votes for Congress. So again, if your state law says that it's people above the age of 30, then same qualifications to vote for federal Congress. Then Article 1, Section 4, the Elections Clause says, quote, the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. That means Congress keeps a backstop to this. It says that it may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, but the factory setting on American elections is actually at the state level. How about for the presidency? Well, Article 2, Section 1 says that each state appoints its electors, quote, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct. So the Constitution doesn't even technically require that you vote for president at all. For decades, some state legislatures picked the electors themselves. South Carolina did that all the way up to the Civil War. So you'd have the state legislature, they would pick the electorate for the electoral college for the presidency. So there was no popular presidential vote in South Carolina that whole time. The popular presidential vote is a choice made by the state. It is not a federal mandate. So why did the founders build it this way? Two reasons. One, they never intended, nor did they like the idea of a pure democracy. They were building a constitutional republic. Madison and Federalist Number 10 warns explicitly about what he called the mischiefs of faction. The entire system was built with checks and balances because the founders did not like and feared them of. The Senate was originally chosen by legislatures. The electoral college was designed to shield from direct popular control the presidency. Judges were life-tenured and appointed. The whole architecture was designed to filter popular passion through many layers of deliberation. and moderation, and checks and balances. Two, federalism. These men had just fought a war against a distant central government dictating to the colonies. The idea that Washington would tell Virginia who could vote, ratification never would have happened. In 1787, states had some pretty wildly different rules. Some required property ownership. Some allowed free black men to vote. Obviously in the south, they didn't allow black people to vote at all. New Jersey famously even allowed some women to vote until 1807. It turns out that there were lots of requirements as to who and who could not vote in the early United States. There are many states in which religion was actually a key component here. If you were a Jew or sometimes if you were a Catholic, you sometimes couldn't vote. So the default rule is the states run the elections. The states set the qualifications. That's the design. Federalism, of course, doesn't mean that every single rule made by every single state was good or bad, right? That's just the way federalism works. That didn't make it right. But over time, The Constitution, through amendment, was course corrected. The three-fifths clause, for example, went away after the Civil War. There are amendments, and the grammar matters a lot here. So let's take a look. The 15th Amendment.

post-Civil War Amendment, 1870, designed to ensure that black people could vote in the South. The right of citizens to vote, quote, shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And then there's the 19th Amendment, 1920, that says that you can't be denied the right to vote on the account of sex. And then there's the 24th Amendment from 1964 that says that you can't have poll taxes. Poll taxes were widely designed and used in order to prevent black people from voting in elections in the South. And then the 26th Amendment, 1971, says that you can't deny anybody 18 years or older the ability to vote. So notice the structure. Every single one of these is written in the negative. Not every citizen has the right to vote, but the right to vote shall not be denied on account of acts. These are anti-discrimination provisions. They tell the states what they can't do. They do not transfer the underlying power to set voter qualifications from the states to the federal government overall. The states still hold the pen within certain restrictions. The amendments cross out certain words. So you cannot say as a state. that a black person can't vote. That's a direct violation of the 15th Amendment. And then because of the 19th Amendment, you can't deny women the right to vote. And then you can't have poll taxes and then you can't deny people over the age of 18 the right to vote. Those are all things that the federal government set in stone. But within those boundaries, the state still gets to make the decisions. So can a state say that you have to show valid photo ID? Sure. Can it require you to register 30 days before the election? Also sure. Can it maintain accurate voter rolls? Of course. Because not having an ID handy is not a protected class in the United States Constitution. And neutral rules that apply to everyone equally are not discrimination. Here is the deeper principle. A right and the rules for exercising that right are not enemies. We have a Second Amendment. For example, that doesn't mean that the government can never run ever a background check. You have a First Amendment. That doesn't mean you can use a bullhorn outside someone's bedroom at 3 a.m. You have a right to vote. That doesn't mean that the state has to count ballots from people who aren't eligible or who vote in the wrong jurisdiction or whose ballots arrive outside the lawful process. Today, when the left says voting rights, they're not talking about anyone being denied a ballot on account of race or on account of age based on above 18 on account of sex. They're talking about a policy wish list. They want automatic registration, universal, no excuse mail voting, ballot harvesting, no voter ID, federal takeover of redistricting. That was HR1. the Democrats' 2021 bill to replace state-by-state control of federal elections with one national rulebook from Washington, totally inverting the framers' design of states' run elections with a federal backstop. Its supporters, including Joe Biden, framed opposition to this as siding with Jim Crow and George Wallace rather than as a legitimate constitutional disagreement. The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It's unrelenting, and we're going to challenge it vigorously. We'll get to more on all of this in just a moment. First, coming up with the idea, that's the easy part of starting a business. Selling it is where people get stuck. It's one thing to make a great product. It's another to build a store people actually trust, create a checkout that actually converts, make the whole experience simple enough that customers will come back. That's why the Daily Wire Store runs on Shopify. From the very beginning, Shopify handled the parts you don't want to think about, like checkout. Nobody's thinking about their POS. That's point of sale.

A partisan gerrymandering claim, which federal courts can't even hear after a case called Rucho, as a racial one. And discrimination claims from some time ago, like decades ago, get much less weight. Plaintiffs need strong evidence of present-day intentional discrimination. So obviously, the meltdown was instantaneous. Elena Kagan's dissentive, said the decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. Activist groups said the court eviscerated voting rights. Well, not really. Section 2's ban on racial discrimination in voting is still on the books. It's nationwide. It's permanent. What the court demolished was the left's ability to use a 1965 statute to mandate permanent racial sorting. To four states into the very race-based line drawing, the 14th Amendment was designed to stop. Equal protection means equal protection. It doesn't mean racial management by judges and consultants forever under a nicer slogan. There is one other front in this war worth discussing that citizenship verification, so federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections. That's not controversial. The fight is over how to enforce it. Right now, that fight is something called the Save Act. Congress must pass the Save America Act. The so-called Save America Act. We passed it three times in the House, the Save Act twice. Last Congress, this Congress, and now the Save America Act. The Save Act is dead on arrival in the Senate. This February, the House passed the SAVE Act to 18 to 213. It requires documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo ID to vote. And then it hit the Senate, where it needs 60 votes. Republicans have 53. Democrats have filibustered this and stopped it dead. As of right now, it's stalled. And that sets up the election integrity as a defining issue for the midterms this fall. Now, the left is screaming that requiring a passport or a birth certificate is some form of voter suppression. But again, notice the underlying constitutional principle. Checking for citizenship is not discrimination. It is the literal definition of maintaining a lawful electorate. If states have the power to set qualifications, and they do. ensuring that only citizens are on the rolls is the most basic exercise of that power. The Constitution absolutely protects voting rights. It bars racial discrimination. It bars sex discrimination. It bars poll taxes in federal elections. It protects every citizen 18 and older. It requires equal protection. What the Constitution does not say is that every convenience is a right. It does not say that every safeguard is a form of suppression. It does not establish a federal right to vote by mail. It does not establish a right to vote without identification. It does not make race conscious racial districting magically constitutional because someone slaps the word equity on it. It does not hand elections directly to Washington, D.C. It puts them back where the founders placed those elections in the states, run by the people's elected legislatures policed by specific amendments against specific forms of discrimination. Georgia passes its election law in 2021. President Biden calls it Jim Crow on steroids. Major League baseball yanks the All-Star game out of Atlanta, costing the region an estimated $100 million. And then Georgia posts record turnout in the very next election. The voters who were supposedly being suppressed showed up in gigantic numbers. At some point,

The theory has to answer to the data. And by the way, more than 80% of Americans support photo ID to vote, including majorities of black Americans and Hispanic Americans. Awkward polling if the whole theory is that ID laws are designed to suppress minorities. Listen, we're all entitled to argue we should amend the Constitution to create some sort of affirmative national right to vote. Some people have proposed it. Fine. Make the case. Get your two-thirds, your three-quarters. That's the process. What you don't get to do is pretend the Constitution says right now what it does not. and then accuse everyone who can read of attacking democracy. A constitutional voting system does two things at once. Every eligible citizen votes without discrimination, and every lawful vote is protected from dilution. That's not anti-democracy. That is democracy. The next time a politician calls a state election law an unconstitutional attack on democracy, ask them to point to the Constitution and explain. They won't be able to because their take isn't there.