Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

by Jesse Wegman

The drafters of the Reconstruction Amendments had anticipated this sort of resistance and had devised a simple and elegant solution: Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which lays out the consequences for any state that denies any of its adult male citizens the right to vote or abridges that right in any way. Those states, the amendment says, will see their representation in Congress “reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”12 This was the official eradication of the three-fifths clause: if you prevent eligible voters from voting, you don’t get to count them toward your representation in Congress. The punishment was straightforward and sensible. That, at any rate, was the hope. As of 2020, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment has never been enforced.

December 26, 2020. Page 110.