The Fourteenth Amendment says, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative to Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same…But Congress may by a two-thirds vote of each House, remove such disability.”
When the Fourteenth Amendment was written, there were no government-printed ballots. Therefore, it is obvious that what the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment did not envision anyone stopping any voter from voting for anyone he wished to vote for. There would have been no enforcement mechanism to stop a voter from voting for someone who had “engaged in insurrection.” Instead, in the context of a presidential election, it is obvious that the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was for Congress to decide in December of presidential election years whether to count the votes of any presidential elector who might have voted for an insurrectionist for President. The precedent was set in 1868 when Congress refused to count the vote of three presidential electors who had voted for Horace Greeley in the electoral college. Congress rejected these three votes because there were cast for a deceased person.
