Over at Common Ground Democracy there’s a new column addressing the common argument that disqualifying Trump from the presidency would be undemocratic because it would deprive America’s voters of the ability to elect the candidate they’d most prefer to win.

The column rebuts this argument by explaining that, in fact, disqualifying Trump might have the consequence of enabling the nation’s voters to elect the candidate they collectively most prefer. Many ELB readers are familiar with the inevitable path-dependency of democratic choice, a point proven by Kenneth Arrow in his famous theorem. This point has received no attention thus far in the context of the public discourse over the potential applicability of section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to Donald Trump (at least from what I’ve seen in my efforts to follow this discussion closely), but it deserves attention.

If Trump wins the GOP nomination, as seems most likely, it may prevent voters in November from electing president the Republican that they–not GOP primary voters–would most want to win. Thus, disqualifying Trump from the race could actually facilitate, not impede, the overall democratic choice of the nation’s electorate. While the Founding generation (including for this purposes the authors of the Twelfth Amendment’s revision to the original Electoral College system) obviously didn’t know Arrow’s Theorem and were only dimly aware of Condorcet’s paradox concerning electoral choice involving more than two candidates, the Madisonian system of constitutional design is based on the premise that republican government requires an intricate system of electoral representation because there is no perfect method of determining the public will.

Recognizing this truth hardly begins to answer the many difficult interpretative issues relating to how section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to Trump’s candidacy. But it should suffice to refute the simplistic assertion that it would be undemocratic to disqualify Trump because it would prevent Americans from choosing their most preferred candidate.