I just said paying taxes as one item on a list of things that make a person part of a community. People that may not pay taxes are still being a part of the community by other actions.
I am really not worried about that. I mean, I find it hard to express exactly how deeply not concerned I am that prisoners will successfully vote to turn their cells into mansions and be buried in prizes upon their release.
They were just Modest Proposals. I think inmates should absolutely be allowed to vote, I was just thinking about possible pitfalls that may need to be dealt with.
Which bugs me since if those same pitfalls (ie a specific group of people being a able to create a majority) happened on the outside, we wouldn’t be looking for ways to break it up, we’d call it democracy in action. Well, except of gerrymandering and getting rid of polling locations and gutting the post office and requiring voter ID laws and mud slinging and only having one day to vote in person (which often requires people to take a day off of work) and stand in a line for hours, and plenty of other things.
I wonder how it would change things if the removal of voting rights was an explicit, stated part of prisoners’ sentences.
“You have been found guilty of possession of pot. You are sentenced to thirty days in prison and sixty days of community service, and you will never be permitted to vote in this country again until the day you die.”
It seems to me to make more sense to allow prisoners to vote in the jurisdiction they lived before arrest, where presumably, their family and friends live, than in the jurisdiction a prisoner has no connection to except sharing a physical address.
Having said that, prison is punishment; and one aspect of being punished is losing your right to vote. I’m not losing any sleep because Harvey Weinstein can’t cast a ballot this year.
A physical address that the prisoner is forced to live in, and can be changed at any time without his consent. I agree, address at the time of incarceration is the most logical address to consider the prisoner’s “home address” for voting and representation purposes.
I can see legitimate arguments for denying the vote to current prisoners, but once someone is released (even on parole) they should get the vote back. The current system seems designed to disenfranchise minorities.
Per wikipeida, “seems” is an understatement.
Many states adopted felon voting bans in the 1860s and 1870s, at the same time that voting rights for Blacks were being considered and contested. Scholars have tied the origins and intents of many state felon voting bans to racial discrimination. In some states, legislators specifically tailored felon voting restrictions so that they would purposely and disproportionately target Blacks, for example, by targeting minor crimes which Blacks could be targeted with while allowing felons who committed more serious crimes (such as murder) to vote.
Speaking as a non-lawyer idiot, it seems to me that the supreme court would have grounds to strike down lifetime disenfranchisement of felons as unconstitutional, if it so desired (and the case was made to it).
You know that can’t happen, right? You don’t get stripped of the right to vote for a petty offense. A crime is a felony if it can be punished by a year or more in prison. (And generally, prisons are for felons, jails are for misdemeanors and people awaiting trial, etc.)
As for the topic in general, I think most prisoners should probably be allowed to vote while in prison. I don’t think they should be allowed to vote in local elections. So, probably either absentee voting based on prior address, or ballots with only state and federal races on them.
Prisoners do not generally meaningfully take part in most of the community in which the prison is located. They do interact with a segment of that community’s population – the guards. If the prison population were large enough compared to the local population, I think there would be too much opportunity (and temptation) too muck up the local government in ways that would not affect the prisoners directly.
Like, vote for huge property taxes, or eliminate all sources of revenue for the town, forcing it to go bankrupt or disenfranchise. Vote to eliminate services to the town that the prisoners get from the state.
Two theories behind taking away felons’ right to vote is that they’ve shown that they do not make good decisions for the community, and, as others have said, they have broken the social contract. I don’t think those considerations completely outweigh the costs of depriving someone of an essential right and their reason to be engaged as a citizen in matters of social and political importance. But, I also don’t think you can just handwaved those concerns away. Preserving the right to vote for most prisoners (I might not extend it to those who committed the worst crimes. I’m not sure.) could avoid those issues best, I think, by not allowing a prison population to be a large voting bloc in a local jurisdiction.
What if they were residents of the local community prior to their incarceration? Would they get ‘absentee ballots’ allowing them to vote in the local election, or would they get state/federal only ballots so as to prevent them from impacting local affairs?
I’ve heard much the same argument used for denying college students the right to vote where they attend school. I don’t think it holds water in either case.
Ya know, there’s a lot of people that don’t make good decisions for the community that are allowed to vote. That sort of the whole point of everyone voting. It’s not just the people that have decided they make good decisions making the decisions for everyone.
Also, keep in mind the people that are in jail are simply the ones that have been caught, tried and found guilty of an offense for which there are plenty of free people that have done the same thing. If you get caught selling a pound of cocaine, you lose your right to vote. If I don’t get caught selling a pound of cocaine, I still get to vote.
Your legal terminology is a little muddled here. Courts have upheld laws which implicitly remove or restrict a right as part of a prisoner’s sentence. But once a person is released from prison, they are obviously no longer a prisoner and any loss of rights associated with being a prisoner no longer apply to them. You know have to explicitly enact a law which removes or restricts that person’s rights.
So, to use an example, if somebody is convicted of a crime, the judge doesn’t have to say “You are sentenced to two years in prison and during that time you will lose your right to keep or carry a firearm.” The judge can just say “You are sentenced to two years in prison” and the fact that you will lose your right to keep or carry a firearm during that period is encompassed by the prison sentence.
But if the government wants to enact a law forbidding people from owning firearms for ten years after they leave prison, they have to enact a law explicitly saying so. A ten year loss of your right can’t just be an implied part of your sentence when you’re not in prison.
Which current system? Each state has its own. Only 11 states take away the right to vote indefinitely upon a felony conviction, 21 states restore voting rights automatically when a felony sentence including parole/probation is completed, 16 states take away the right to vote only while a person is actually imprisoned for a felony, and two allow voting in prison. Cite.
As to your point, I would note that there seems to be little political or demographic pattern to which states take which approach, except that the states in the most restrictive category are mostly red states.
Whichever of the two systems I said would address my concerns is adopted. I said either way would address those concerns. I think absentee is probably the most fair, and it would work the same for everyone in the prison, including a person from the local community. The point is about the potential for a disproportionate influence, not that no prisoner should be able to vote in a local election where the prison is located.
Eschrondinger said they lost their rights because they had been shown to not make good decisions. That’s different that the presumption that somebody doesn’t make good decisions.
Our legal system is based on the principle that everyone is presumed to be innocent of a crime until they have been shown to have committed that crime. And the same principle can apply to voting. A person can be presumed to be fit to vote until they have been shown not to be.
I don’t think it holds water at all for students. Some of the differences between students and prisoners have already been pointed out. I’m not really sure how to respond to this kind of argument. I say population X, which is already subject to having many rights curtailed due to their own actions, should have a restriction that is applied to them loosened, but with still a minor restriction, because of reason A.
You say, people have used reason A to argue that population Y, college students – a group not generally subject to having any of their rights curtailed just by virtue of being college students – should also be restricted in that way. And then you say you think both arguments are wrong. I guess my simplest answer is to say I think you are half right. I don’t really see the point of arguing about it further than to say I think it’s obvious that there are major differences between college students and prisoners, and that someone making a similar argument unpersuasively in a very different context does not invalidate the argument in the original context.
Certainly if someone has completed their sentence and been released they should be allowed to vote again. Punishments shouldn’t last a lifetime except in extreme cases.
My immediate response to this is that I do not believe that all crimes, even all felonies, equally demonstrate that a person is not fit to vote.
For example, a person that commits murder in a fit of anger might have more reasonable opinions about federal matters than, say, a person convicted of embezzlement who has demonstrated a calm willingness to distort systems of rules.
My point was that just because someone hasn’t been shown to make poor decisions doesn’t imply that they make good ones.
In my example, if you have two drug dealers and one gets caught while the other doesn’t. They’ve both made the same decisions (at least for the purposes of this argument), but only the one that gets caught loses their right to vote.
I’m not saying that the drug dealer that didn’t get caught should lose their right to vote (based on presumptive guilt), I’m saying that the one that did get caught should still be allowed to vote (despite their proven guilt).