13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 104 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com A2 CONSTITUTIONALITY CONGRESS IS AUTHORIZED TO ENFORCE THE TH AMENDMENT – JUSTIFIES COMPULSORY VOTING. HLR – 2007. The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (Dec, 2007), pp. 591-612. Congress's Power To Enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. - For presidential and state elections, a plausible candidate for congressional authority to compel voting is Congress's power to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, and specifically the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged ... on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" n [*606] In City of Boerne v. Flores, n the Supreme Court cutback substantially on Congress's formerly broad power to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments. Although the Court maintained that Congress has the power to impose prophylactic remedies, it held that Congress may do so only if there is "congruence and proportionality" between the injury to be remedied and the means adopted to do son There is no doubt that the current voting system in the United States results in the underrepresentation of racial minorities. But the Reconstruction Amendments prohibit only intentional discrimination. n It would be difficult to link all or even most of the underrepresentation of racial minorities among voters to intentional efforts to disenfranchise them on account of their race. n Without a concrete and well-documented problem of intentional discrimination by government officials against racial minorities in the voting context, it is unlikely that compulsory voting laws would meet Boerne's "congruence and proportionality" test.
