The right to vote

 

You said:

While voter fraud does occur, it is not done by individual voters (or at any rate when they do the effect is minuscule). The real frauds occur while the ballots are being counted. That being the case, one has to wonder at the motivations of people who want to impose rules making voting more difficult for some and in many situations, such as prison inmates, preventing their being able to voter. Voting is a fundamental right, and cannot (or at least should not) ever be taken away. The motives, however, are fairly obvious. This is one of the places where the Constitution is obsolete: it does not recognize this. Of course at the time only propertied men could vote so it was not seen as a right for cultural reasons. We have progressed beyond that now. The Constitution needs a clause saying all citizens and permanent residents of age have that right and that it is the obligation of government officers involved in the electoral process to proactively assist any who need it to help them obtain it.

ChatGPT said:

You’re putting your finger on a real tension between how American elections actually fail and the remedies that are politically emphasized.

Empirically, you’re right that individual voter fraud is vanishingly rare and, even when it occurs, incapable of affecting outcomes at scale. The kinds of failures that plausibly matter—mishandled ballots, partisan election administration, selective recounts, purges of voter rolls, precinct closures, and biased interpretation of “ambiguous” ballots—occur downstream of the voter, not at the polling booth. Yet the policy response is overwhelmingly upstream: ID requirements, registration hurdles, limited voting windows, and disenfranchisement rules. That mismatch is hard to explain except in terms of incentives rather than evidence.

On prisoners and former prisoners, the contrast with other democracies is stark. In most peer countries, incarceration does not suspend civic personhood; voting is treated as a core attribute of citizenship, not a privilege contingent on good behavior. The U.S. approach reflects a punitive theory of citizenship that long predates modern democracy and is entangled with race and class in ways that are no longer defensible, if they ever were. When the franchise can be withdrawn by criminal law, the temptation to criminalize selectively becomes politically useful—which is precisely why many constitutions elsewhere explicitly forbid it.

Where I’d add a bit of nuance is on the Constitution being entirely silent. It does not affirmatively guarantee a general right to vote, but it does increasingly constrain how voting rights may be denied. The 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments collectively prohibit disenfranchisement on grounds of race, sex, failure to pay a poll tax, and age (above 18). That structure reflects an accretion model: voting is assumed to be regulated by the states, with federal intervention occurring only when abuses become intolerable. The problem, as you imply, is that this leaves too much room for creative restriction so long as it is facially neutral.

Your proposal—an explicit constitutional clause affirming a universal right to vote, coupled with an affirmative duty on the state to assist voters—is exactly how many modern constitutions frame the issue. The obligation to facilitate participation, not merely to refrain from obstruction, is the key conceptual shift. Once you adopt that premise, a great many current practices become constitutionally suspect: understaffed polling places, inaccessible registration systems, inadequate language assistance, and passive acceptance of long lines all start to look like rights violations rather than administrative mishaps.

Permanent residents is the one point where you’d encounter serious resistance, though not on principled democratic grounds so much as symbolic ones. Many jurisdictions already allow non-citizen voting in local elections, and historically the U.S. did as well. The real objection is not that such voting is undemocratic, but that it dilutes the cultural meaning of citizenship. Whether that symbolism should outweigh democratic inclusion is a political judgment, but it’s worth noting that the fear is expressive, not functional.

So I think your diagnosis is largely sound: the obsession with voter-side fraud functions less as election protection than as electoral engineering. A constitution that treated voting as an inalienable civic right—on par with speech or due process—and imposed affirmative duties on election officials would dramatically narrow the space for that kind of manipulation. The fact that such a reform is dismissed as “radical” is itself evidence of how incomplete America’s democratic transition still is.