If felons are ineligible to vote, then their votes steal elections. I understand a lot of people think felons should be allowed to vote. That’s fine. That’s why we have elections, to decide such things. Democrats should campaign on making it legal for felons to vote.
Republicans should campaign on just being felons.
So getting rid of midterms is off the table? For now, anyway I suppose.
Where do you live that there are so many felons that their votes could swing an election?
(Besides, is there any evidence that the ‘felons’ vote wouldn’t be split between parties, just like other votes?)
If what you’re saying is that 'felons are mostly black or brown*, and ‘those people’ shouldn’t be allowed to vote, just come out and say it. We would not be startled to hear that from you.
- Not true.
Okay, so now we’re assuming that felons split about 50-50. All righty then.
And the felon vote has been the difference in Al Franken’s first election and the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election.
Your points will never be considered clever if everyone already knows you’re stupid, adaher.
You guys are evading the actual issue with felon voting. Should it be legal or not? Where it is illegal, should the law be enforced or not?
If certain types of voters are legally ineligible, then if an election’s margin is decided by those voters, is it not fair to say that the election has been stolen?
Sure. I even started a thread asking why it should be illegal, didn’t get any good answers.
Sure. Can it be done without disenfranchising an equal or larger number of nonfelons, though?
It is not fair to say that. “Stolen” implies a concentrated effort to secure the result for a particular candidate regardless of what the electorate wants. Individual felons voting independently does not do this in and of itself. If you want to claim all the felons were working in concert to vote a particular way, maybe, but I’d like to see a cite.
Non-enforcement is a concerted effort to steal an election. The government has databases. It takes less than a minute to check if a registrant is a felon. Or to simply remove someone from the rolls within days of their conviction.
As for why it should be illegal for felons to vote, one valid reason is that felons have already proven they are not good citizens. We don’t let them have guns, why would we let them elect the guys who control the guys with guns?
I’m agnostic on the question of whether it’s good policy, but one thing I do believe firmly is that it’s far more important for felons to have the right to get jobs and housing. Democrats seem awfully interested in getting them to the polls, a lot less interested in letting them get occupational licenses or prevent companies from discriminating against felons when there isn’t a compelling interest at stake(like safety). While many Democrats, like President Obama, have the right views on these issues, most Democrats consider getting them to vote to be urgent, getting them their lives back a much lower priority.
There are places where ex-convicts, released from prison and having served their time, are eligible to have their right to vote restored. In some of those places, there is a very long waiting list, and many of them continue to be denied the restoration of their rights, even though the law recommends it.
(The law is carefully written to remove their right to have their rights restored. They can’t sue. But there are places that have made it all but impossible for the process to go forward. A handful of commissioners may be in place to handle many thousands of appeals, etc.)
And, yes, definitely, if it is illegal, then that law should be enforced. If you can identify a place where significant numbers of felons vote inappropriately, then additional enforcement needs to be engaged. Same for places where significant numbers of non-citizens register and vote. We hear accusations of this happening on a large scale, but is there any actual evidence?
You can *try *to pretend you weren’t claiming most felons are Democrats. But you were.
Oh, I’m claiming most felons are Democrats. Don’t misunderstand me on that count.
Oh, we understand you fine. We also know as well as you that you have nothing but your usual partisan bluster to support that claim.
But… but… government database bad. You said so, yourself…
What?! You want to deprive citizens of their right to own guns? What are you, some kind of Second-Amendment-Hating Liberal Pansy Communist?!
Of course the question on the article was if the number of those votes could make the democrats take congress in 2014.
[Igor] Well, they were wrong then, weren’t they?[/Igor]
There was an extraordinary level of scrutiny made to the votes in the Sen. Al Franken close election. The makers of the article argue with no evidence and less convincing arguments that the numbers in that study could mean that illegals helped elect Franken. That is really unbelievable as I do remember how many people that research the issue found virtually noting. The Franken case is not good evidence for what they claimed, making one doubt the conclusions of that study.
And sure enough, since it was done in 2014 I expected that not only the results of the election then made a mockery of their finds, but also by now there were a lot of studies and criticism made that shows how unreliable that research was.
And of course since 2014 more research has pointed that what the Republicans have used to justify their voter suppression crusades are based on half baked research and even complete lies.
Before, and after 2014.
I forgot that we are in the pit!
Well, besides noticing that you lied to all and you are once again carrying water for Trump and the Republicans, you are only demonstrating [Forrest Gump]again!..[/FG] how inept you are in detecting that they have been pulling your leg. (Again…)
And as usual it is your leg that is related to a disdain and prejudice against minorities and immigrants.
I should add that there is an element of logic here: since Republicans have made a sport of disenfranchising people that already paid their debt to society, it would not be surprising to me that a lot of former felons that were Republicans would turn into Democrats at the sight of the Republicans stealing their votes now.
The kerfluffle about Franken and the “felon vote” is deep dish crapola. I’m assuming that you haven’t really dug into that story and just heard a snippet passed around.
What I gathered from local news sources was confusion resulting from misunderstanding terms of probation. That is, felons released from prison some time past but who still had some probationary time on their sentence were advised that they need not report any longer, effectively “ending” their probation.
It was not made clear to them that their civil rights were not restored, as they would be (in MN) at the end of their probation. They thought their probation had been legally shortened, their sentence served, and they were restored. They were mistaken.
The election was incredibly close, the recount was public, transparent, and agonizingly slow. Once it became apparent that the Republicans would lose by a butterfly’s whisker, they got frantic, searching for something other than what was laid out before them. This “felon vote” booshwa was a dull flash in the pan. Franken won by the merest margin, but fair and square.
You should check your source on that driblet of diarrhea, and never listen to them again.
North Carolina Republicans aren’t following court orders to cut the shit.
This is very similar, in world-view, claim, and in tone, to many Bricker posts. Do others agree that this is reminscent of Bricker’s perspective? I think I’ll call adaher the Bricker Apprentice.
Let’s turn this thread into an exploration of psychological connections between adaher and Bricker.
@ Bricker, again we need input from you. I doubt you’d call adaher your understudy, but is he an apprentice? a disciple? Or is his a false-flag operation?