Look at Dannemora. It’s a small town in northern New York. It has a population of around 3900 people. About 2900 of these people are incarcerating in the maximum security prison in the middle of the town. Should they be allowed to vote for who the mayor is and who gets a seat on the town council? The lives of these prisoners is not controlled by the village of Dannemora.
Well, I will bet you a quarter right now that Dannemora uses that population to figure out how the districting is done–prisons are commonly used for gerrymandering schemes. If the town or county is counting those prisoners as part of their population then it’s pretty hypocritical to NOT allow them to vote–they are unwitting residents being used to determine all kinds of funding without being given a voice.
To some extent I can understand that one. It does make some sense that people might not want to be able to be able to making changes to local politics when you’re almost certainly not going to be part of it within a year or two. I’m not saying I agree or disagree, just that I can understand it.
Of course, the opposite argument could also be made. Their hometown could say that they shouldn’t vote their either since they only live in that city a few months out of the year.
There’s a city by me that should be very conservative. But it tends to be much bluer than people expect since such a large percentage of the houses are duplexes and rented out to college students.
Which is why voting should be done in prison. Bring election officials in, have them set up a room as the poll, set up a booth, prisoners line up, go in the booth to mark up their ballot, put it in the box, and depart. No mailing of votes.
This year is a tough exception due to Covid, but in the future, no reason not to do elections this way.
You are right. Towns do fight to have prisoners including in their population for census purposes. And I agree that this isn’t right.
But I feel the idea of letting the prisoners vote in local elections is the wrong solution to this problem.
I don’t see students as a valid comparison to prisoners. Students are part of the community they are residing in in ways that prisoners are not. Students pay taxes and other money into the local economy, they use public services, they walk around in public places, and they interact with the other people in the community. They have a legitimate claim to a say in community affairs.
I don’t think it’s a solution to that problem, but I don’t think the government’s mistakes are a good reason to deny people their right to vote. There are a ton of problems in the prison system to fix, there’s no reason to make voting rights responsible for those solutions.
I don’t think they have to fight for it any more than some districts fight to have their undocumented immigrants counted for the purposes of representation. It’s just how the law works.
I know of at least one case where there was a fight (or a conflict or a dispute or however you want to label it). The prison straddled the border between two towns and both of them wanted to claim the population of the prison lived within their town.
I don’t feel prisoners are denied the right to vote because of a government mistake. I feel there is a legitimate argument to be made that people lose their right to vote while they are incarcerated.
The prison isn’t allowed to look at legal mail either; they quite often do so anyway, and claim it’s a “mistake.” Staff aren’t punished, because the prison administration doesn’t view it as a big deal or worthy of punishment. Even if the prison administration decides to take action over an opened secret ballot (or hundreds of opened secret ballots), the damage has been done.
The staff not being allowed to look at a secret ballot doesn’t prevent the staff from doing so anyway, and then taking action against prisoners for the contents of that ballot. (Heck, corrupt prison staff could demand, ‘show me your ballot before you seal it or I’ll write you up for disrespect.’ Who do you think the prison’s disciplinary administrator is going to believe, the inmate or the officer?)
That should not be a consideration. I believe every citizen of majority age should be allowed to vote. That’s what democracy is, the system has already failed by using the justice system to deny people their voting rights and they then have no recourse. If you were targeted to deny your voting rights through some artifice you wouldn’t like it either. I don’t understand why criminal action should result in a loss of voting rights. What part of their sentence is reduced to to compensate for that additional punishment?
If you disagree with that principal you can find all sorts of practical excuses to deny people their rights but I don’t see the point in doing that. If you think people in prison shouldn’t be allowed to vote then just say that. You won’t get a lot of arguments. There’s no need to find additional logistic problems.
If this is addressed to me, I thought I had done that. If I wasn’t clear, let me explicitly say that I don’t feel that people should be allowed to vote while they are serving prison sentences.
I’m not saying we should come up with ways to put obstacles in the way of prisoners voting; I’m saying we should openly prohibit it. But if a law did give prisoners the right to vote, then the law should be carried out without efforts to interfere with it.
To make another point clear, I only feel people should lose their right to vote while they are in prison. I don’t feel there is any reason why they should lose their right to vote after they have completed their prison sentence and been released back into the community; former prisoners should have the same right to vote as anyone else. I also feel that people who are confined in jails prior to conviction should continue to have the right to vote.
I was responding to slash2k actually. You did state your position clearly. I don’t think I could get you to change your mind, a lot of people agree with you, and it’s a subject I’m sure you’re well informed about.
When ex-pats vote absentee overseas, they can self-declare themselves to be residents of any state they like, and have that state’s ballot supplied. It is not a difficult enigma to overcome.
Just tell the prisoners they can vote in their home town if they want, or Leavenworth. Their choice.
As for the other question, where does the constitution say who can be or can’t be denied the vote?
The Constitution mostly leaves that decision up to the states. There are some grounds for disenfranchising people which are specifically prohibited - age, race, gender - but there’s nothing prohibiting states from disenfranchising people based on criminal record.
Maybe the solution is to put prisons on unincorporated land. Or not to have so many prisoners. Or to have more smaller prisons, scattered around.
I don’t think prisoners should be disenfranchised just because some town that is getting state revenue based on their headcount doesn’t want to let them vote.
What’s the argument?
(I gave a logistical argument, about prisoners not being free to vote without interference. But I gather you think they should be allowed to vote.)
Don’t get me started. I’ll just say this was tried and it was a really bad idea.
First, the legal issue. Incarcerated criminals surrender a number of their rights (some of them more explicitly protected than voting) due to their status. So there really isn’t any legal hurdle here.
Second, there’s the social issue I mentioned above. I see voting as a right associated with being part of the community you vote in. You are making decisions for the community. You should be balancing the costs of your decisions with their benefits. You should be applying your experience in the community to determining what’s best for it. Prisoners may geographically reside in a community but they are not part of the community. They never interact with outside members of the town they live in, they do not pay taxes or otherwise contribute to the town, they do not use the public services of the town or have the opportunity to do so. So I feel they would not be able to, much less motivated to, make informed decisions about what the best interests of the community are.
Third, there’s the philosophical issue. Criminals, by the actions, have chosen to place themselves outside of the political system. They essentially made the decision that they don’t have to follow the laws that everyone agreed to follow. So I feel that removing them from the political system is a legitimate portion of their punishment just like removing them physically from society.
Fourth, there are the practical difficulties which have already been discussed in this thread.