States’ rights limited the vote count (a Florida law said that all of the votes had to be counted by midnight Tuesday, December 12, even though the Supreme Court stopped the vote count on Friday, December 8) because there was no individual right to vote in the Constitution. An individual right to vote would have taken precedence over Florida’s state law and required that all of the votes be counted no matter how long it took.
Recently, of course, the Supreme Court ruled that the proper interpretation of the 2nd Amendment was that we have an “individual right to a gun.” Ironically, then, we find ourselves in an American democracy that says we have an individual right to a gun but not an individual right to vote.
This Article First Appeared in The Black Truth News Volume 1 Issue 10 Sept. 20101