IIIEssay 3. One Family, One Vote

Dale Partridge, who pastors King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, has a book coming. It is called 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment, his publisher announced it for September, and his own author page says the amendment has been a catastrophic mistake for America and the Church. He has told his audience he wants it gone within ten years.

This site reads documents. So read the one he wants gone. All of it.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Twenty-eight words and an enforcement clause. That’s it. The Amendment does not say that women vote wisely (or anyone votes wisely). It does not say women are prudent, or informed, or temperate, or that their judgment improves the republic (again, or anyone does). It makes no claim about women at all. It names one ground and forbids the use of it. A state may set an age. It may require residency. It may demand registration by a deadline and turn away anyone who misses it. What it may not do is reach for sex. And yet, that’s what Dale wants done; he wants to reach for sex and then discriminate.

That distinction is the whole of this essay, and almost everything said in favor of repeal fails to notice it. Or, blindly ignores it.

What he has actually proposed

Begin with his own account, which is public and not in dispute.

I don’t think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I don’t love women.

I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.

That is the motive. The mechanism came a few days later, and it is the more interesting document, because a motive can be argued about forever while a mechanism can be checked.

Why repeal the 19th Amendment for the household vote?

The state wants to treat married couples as individuals, but Scripture says, “The two become one flesh.”

The household vote restores the state’s view of the covenant household.

One family. One vote.

So the proposal is not merely subtraction. Something is meant to take the Amendment’s place: a franchise held by households rather than by people, one vote to a family, cast by its head. Hold that next to the text above and the first problem is already visible. The right the Amendment protects belongs to citizens of the United States. A household is not a citizen. It cannot be naturalised, it cannot be of age, and it cannot be denied anything on account of sex. One family, one vote is not an edit to the Amendment. It is a different answer to the prior question of who the Constitution is speaking to, and that question was settled a long way upstream of 1920.

The wrong branch

Set the merits aside for a moment and look at the plan, because the plan is where this comes apart fastest. Asked how repeal would happen, he reached for the obvious recent precedent: if Roe v. Wade could be repealed, he said, then he thinks the Nineteenth Amendment can be overturned. He has put a timeline on it of ten or fifteen years and described the goal as a Supreme Court case repealing the Nineteenth.

Roe v. Wade was a decision of the Supreme Court. The Nineteenth Amendment is the Constitution. A court can overrule its own reasoning, and in 2022 one did. No court can strike language out of the instrument that creates it. There is no cause of action, no standing, no remedy, and no judgment a court could enter that would do it. The comparison he has chosen to lean on is in fact the cleanest available demonstration that his plan is impossible: Roe is the example of what courts can undo, which is courts, and the Nineteenth Amendment is the example of what they cannot, which is text.

The suffragists found this out first, and from the other direction. Before the Amendment existed they went to court to argue that the Fourteenth already gave women the vote, and they lost.

Progress continued to be discouraging, only ten additional states having joined Wyoming by 1914, and, judicial efforts having failed.

Judicial efforts having failed. That is the record. The courts would not put women’s suffrage into the Constitution, so it took Article V to put it there: two thirds of both Houses, then ratification by three quarters of the states. Article V is also the only door out. Thirty-eight states, or a convention called by two thirds of the legislatures. It has been walked exactly once, for Prohibition, by a country that had changed its mind inside fourteen years.

A Supreme Court case is not a difficult route to that. It is not a route to it. Ten years is not an ambitious schedule for the wrong procedure; the schedule is not the thing that is wrong.

“Restore” is carrying weight it has not earned

Two days earlier he had put it in a sentence: “Repeal the 19th Amendment and restore the household vote.” Restore implies the household vote is something America once had and has lost. It is not.

The franchise before 1920 was not held by households. It was held by men. Unmarried men voted. Widowers voted. A bachelor of twenty-two with no household to head and no one to represent but himself voted, and the married woman keeping a home with six children in it did not. Whatever the arrangement before the Amendment was, it was not one family, one vote. It was sex. Which is precisely the ground the Amendment names, and precisely why the Amendment names it.

This produces a dilemma he has not resolved anywhere I can find, and his own posts reach for both of its horns. Either the unit of the franchise really is the household, or it is the man.

If it is the household, then a woman who heads one votes. The widow votes. The unmarried woman with her own mortgage votes. The divorced mother of three votes. On his own stated principle they must, because the vote attaches to the household and they are the head of theirs. But then the thing he says he is frightened of is untouched, and the single women he has described as a threat to the nation keep their ballots. The proposal does not do the work he wants from it.

If it is the man, then the household is decoration. The rule is sex with a softer name, and it is the one rule the Amendment’s text forbids in terms.

He cannot have it both ways, and the choice is not a detail. It is the entire content of the proposal.

It would not survive even if a state tried it

Suppose a state attempted some version of this without bothering with Article V. The Amendment answers that too, and the Supreme Court said so the only time it has construed the provision directly.

applies to men and women alike and by its own force supersedes inconsistent measures, whether federal or State

By its own force. No implementing statute required, no act of Congress needed, nothing for a sympathetic legislature to repeal first. An inconsistent measure is superseded by the existence of the Amendment.

The strongest thing that can be said on the other side

Here is the best version, and it deserves to be stated properly rather than waved at.

Article V contains no eternity clause. Nothing in the Constitution is beyond amendment, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed within living memory, and a constitution that a citizen may not argue to change is a scripture rather than a law. A site that spends its time insisting documents be read as written cannot turn around and treat one of them as holy writ. Partridge’s right to argue for repeal is not in question, and anyone answering him by saying the subject is closed has conceded the more important principle in order to win the smaller argument.

All of that is true. I grant every word of it.

The answer is that the right to make the argument is exactly what creates the duty to make it well, and the case on offer is not made well. What is published in support of it is an assertion that nearly every legalized moral atrocity in the last hundred years was made possible by the female vote, which is a counting claim about recorded votes in legislatures, and the counting has not been done or shown. Alongside it runs a chain of ten captions, from women voting with emotions through to Western nations collapsing, with each link resting on the one above it and none of them resting on anything.

But the deeper trouble is structural, and it would survive even if every one of those claims were established tomorrow. The Nineteenth Amendment does not stand on a finding that women vote well. If it did, evidence that they vote badly would undermine it. It stands on a rule about what may not be used to apportion the franchise. So the claim that the majority of women are not capable of responsible voting is not an argument against the Amendment. It is the argument the Amendment was written to put out of bounds, restated as though the Amendment were not there. To get anywhere, repeal has to show that the forbidden ground is a good ground. That argument is not in the posts, and on the evidence of the posts it is not coming.

What should worry people who do not care about this man at all

Partridge has an audience and a publisher, and neither is the reason to write about him. The reason is the instrument.

The household vote is a proposal to change the unit of American representation from the person to the group, and to let the head of a group cast a ballot that binds an adult who may disagree with him. There is no principle inside that idea which stops at wives. Once the unit is the household, every question about who counts is open again: who heads one, what happens to the adult son under his father’s roof, how many votes a compound gets, who adjudicates it, and which level of government keeps the register of heads. Those questions have answers only if someone is empowered to give them, and that someone is not you.

It is the same pattern this site keeps finding in duller documents. The objectionable thing is rarely the stated goal. It is the lever the goal requires, and the people who will be holding it afterwards.

The Amendment is twenty-eight words. It denies the government one tool and leaves it every other. That is a modest thing to ask of a country, and it has been asked successfully for a hundred and six years.

Sources

• The document: Nineteenth Amendment, National Archives transcription, passed by Congress 4 June 1919, ratified 18 August 1920.
• Minor v. Happersett and Breedlove v. Suttles, with the quoted passages, from the Constitution Annotated, Government Publishing Office (2014 revision), at 2255 and 2256.
• The book and its description: dalepartridge.com, listing 19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment; the publisher, NXR Studios, announced September 2026.
• The posts quoted above: 5 November 2025, 7 November 2025, and the household vote.
• The Roe comparison, the ten-year timeline and the chain of captions, as transcribed by Baptist News Global, The Roys Report and Right Wing Watch.