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It says...”counting the whole number of persons in each State”.

You can't just stop reading at the first comma. That's what the liberals do.

If you keep reading, the fuller context of the section becomes clear that it's for the purpose of ensuring that the right to vote is not infringed. The section lays out the penalty to the states for infringing on their citizens' right to vote by proportionally reducing their representation by the percentage of infringed voters to the total eligible voters. You can't assess that without counting voters, that is, citizens.

Furthermore, let's say that the argument becomes that blacks vote in such high numbers today that any disenfranchised black voters would be such a small number relative to the whole to be essentially meaningless, making the counting of citizens for this purpose essentially meaningless.

The rebuttal to this would be several:

Even though the 14th amendment was intended to be about citizenship of former slaves, it's been expanded to include anyone, including anchor babies, when it serves the left. To narrow it back to just black disenfranchisement for the original purpose of counting citizens would be hypocritical.
It's in the Constitution and can't be waived away because some people don't like it. It makes clear that Representatives were meant to be apportioned based on citizen voters, not just "whole number of persons."
When reading the word "persons" and "people" in the Constitution, I take that to refer to "We the People" in the Preamble who ordained and established this Constitution. "Whole number of persons" meant "whole number of We the People," but was more economical writing. When the 10th amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," I can't believe that they meant for those "people" to include illegal aliens as "persons." They meant "We the People" who ordained and established this Constitution, and OUR posterity.
Even though this section was about punishing states for not allowing freed blacks to vote, the section also says "when the right to vote at any election is... in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime..." Allowing non-citizens to vote abridges the vote of legal voting citizens via nullification. This section would justify reducing the Representation in states turning a blind eye toward illegal citizen voting by the ratio of illegal voters to total legal voters. That would be devastating if it were enumerated.

-PJ

Actually, the text of the 14th Amendment, section 2, reads:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=43&page=transcript

The point is reinforced, that representation should only be apportioned (i.e. allocated) based on the citizen population of the states.

The 14th Amendment was all about citizenship and primarily added to the Constitution to make sure black males born in the country were recognized, and counted (i.e. "WHOLE") as a citizen. Why does the 14th Amendment use the word "whole" more than once? Because the original Constitution counted blacks as 3/5's a person [1], which was done primarily to prevent the south from having even more power (i.e. Representatives in the House). Imagine how difficult it would have been to eventually eliminate slavery if the south had more political power during those years!

Since the 14th Amendment, the 19th Amendment was passed to allow women to vote in state and federal elections (they could already vote in some local elections much earlier) [2]

This is indeed proof that if a census is to be used to apportion, or determine the number of, House of Reps by state, that citizenship is the qualifier and therefore must be included on any census in order to justify the number of Reps based on number of citizens.