It obviously depends. In Louisiana, when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke ran for governor against spectacularly corrupt Edwin Edwards (who later served eight years in prison for his crimes), bumper stickers (rightly, in my opinion) urged: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
As an American living in Japan, I can’t vote in the elections here, but Japanese have consistently allowed the LDP to remain in power since 1955, with only a few breaks starting in 1993, despite countless scandals involving bribery.
It doesn’t help that most of the opposition politicians are former LDP members so there isn’t much difference between the parties.
German here; I assume non-Americans can still post here after the scope was wiedened to include Americans a few posts above.
Mainly, in Germany the question does not arise as there is no major party where a particular person has such a hold on their party that they wouldn’t fire their leader (er, strongly suggest to their leader behind closed doors that he or she is to resign). At the very latest when an indictment is brought it would be curtains.
That applies to the Federal Republic (1949-present). Historically there was one exception: Hitler, whose party was all “Our leader was convicted for high treason, hooray”. One main factor was that Hitler had been sentenced to fortress confinement, which was not considered dishonorable. Had the sentence been for prison he would have been done for politically.
Hitler had an institutional hold on his party which the postwar constitution and party law was at pains to outlaw - intra-party democracy is now enforced by law.
It is different in some other countries - in the Netherlands Geert Wilders heads a successful right-wing populist party, the PVV, where that he closed to new members after founding it, i.e. he is the only party member so cannot be fired. In the UK the Reform UK Party Ltd., formerly the Brexit Party Ltd., is a corporation, i.e. the shareholders are protected from intraparty democracy.
A politician in Germany who has strayed off the straight and narrow can be redeemed in the public eye after some years. For example Greens politician Cem Özdemir had to bow to public pressure and refuse taking his Bundestag seat that he had been reelected to in 2002, over accusations of improperly taking a private loan for 80.000 DM from a PR consultant, and of improperly using frequent flyer miles accrued in official trips for getting a suitcase. He later got elected to the European Parliament for one term, tried and failed to get elected again to the Bundestag in 2009, tried and succeded to get elected to the Bundestag in 2013, and he now is Minister for Agriculture since 2021.
A felony conviction (for a crime with a minimum penalty of 1 year, and actually being sentenced to a prison term of at least 1 year) automatically makes the person ineligible to any public office for 5 years, so in most case I would not even have the opportunity to vote for a recent felon.
We might have got a Chancellor with a felony conviction or at least indictment for all the right reasons - Willy Brandt, in exile during the Third Reich except for a undercover mission in 1936, was formally investigated for high treason but not indicted by Nazi authorities who had not got hold of him. At the time, of course, it would have been the duty of all Germans to commit high treason.
So:
- no way I would even have the opportunity to vote for a recently convicted felon, both for party political (the party firing the person) and for legal (ineligibility) reasons
- there would be some extremely exceptional circumstances where a felony conviction would not count against the candidate in the public eye (example: Willy Brand if the Nazis had taken the trouble to try him in absentia).
- conceivably, after a long period in the wilderness, a rehabilitated felon might have a chance to stand and be elected. In my example Cem Özdemir came back after about one decade after lapses that were not even against the law; an actual felon would need much more time.
I voted “probably but it depends on”. But thinking about the national leader example makes me uncertain.
Most candidates on my ballot are running, in primaries and in general elections, for county and local offices. I try to find out something about each race, but information is often limited. So if I knew that a candidate had a felonious history, that would be one of the few facts I knew about them, and would influence my vote a great deal.
But when it comes to presidential candidates, whether in the primary or general election, I read so much about each that an additional piece of negative information probably will not be decisive.
If low information voters really know hardly anything about Donald Trump, of course his conviction should influence them.
Of course, this points out a major issue: If someone is a convicted felon, particularly if they’re in a prominent national position like running for office, it’s likely that they’ve done a lot of other shady shit that would also disqualify them from getting my vote.
The opinions of the “Fuck Trudeau” contingent aside, he hasn’t really done much else to deserve condemnation. Were he to suddenly commit a felony, that would be a one-off event, that could be analyzed in isolation: Is that particular act worthy of losing my vote? At that point, it’s just like any other political question, like, “If he suddenly announced he was supporting a ban on abortion”.
But with Trump, the felony conviction was just the cherry on top of the shit sundae of reasons not to vote for him.
What would matter to me is the severity of the crime and if it was something that took place while in office or through the abuse of power. Felony possession of drugs, especially early in life would not be a show-stopper. Later in life, or while in office could get me to rule them out, not because of the nature of a drug crime, but because it is a sign of irresponsibility. There are plenty of examples where the felony is not serious enough nor relevant to holding the office, and plenty more where it would matter.
Not too many questions and I am not in any of their ridings so I can’t vote for the leaders directly, but I would vote for the applicable candidate in my riding. Which, distressingly, is so overwhelmingly Conservative that my vote will is meaningless, even if it isn’t pointless. Crooked PM is worse than a crooked MP. The PM can do more damage and can help shield other MPs.
I might be naive, but with our campaign financing rules and independently run elections, crooked MPs have less room to run rampant than I suspect is the case in the US, for example.
One US state has a law on the books that prohibits conviched felons from appearing on the ballot, and you can be sure it will be tested this year. It is not clear whether the law is applicable to the Presidential ballot (which chooses electors, not the candidate), but 49 other states and DC do not apparently have such laws. And it is not really a “swing” state.
Trump will try to demand payment to him for his debt to society…
that would depend on whether you want the sentence to be coherent and make sense