The Reconstruction Amendments are justly celebrated for
transforming millions of recent slaves into voting citizens. Yet
this legacy of egalitarian enfranchisement had a flip side. In
arguing that voting laws should not discriminate on the basis of
morally insignificant statuses, such as race, supporters of the
Reconstruction Amendments emphasized the legitimacy of
retributive disenfranchisement as a punishment for immoral
actions, such as crimes. Former slaves were not just compared
with virtuous military veterans, as commentators have long
observed, but were also contrasted with immoral criminals. The
mutually supportive relationship between egalitarian
enfranchisement and punitive disenfranchisement — between voting
and vice — motivated and shaped all three Reconstruction
Amendments. Counterintuitively, the constitutional entrenchment
of criminal disenfranchisement facilitated the enfranchisement
of black Americans. This conclusion complicates the conventional
understanding of how and why voting rights exp