Do you remember in 2000 when the office of the Secretary of State of Florida was purging voters because they supposedly were convicted felon parolees? (Many were not.) Florida, as do many other states, has a law which says parolees can’t vote. (I think some even have laws which say any convicted felon who is not on parole or probation can’t vote.)
Well, if a state can do that, what’s to keep a state from purging people who have gotten a speeding ticket? Or a jaywalking ticket?
I can understand why a parolee shouldn’t be around other convicts or gangbangers, or possess a firearm, or engage in various other behaviors that could be a danger to the public.
But voting? How is anyone going to be a danger to the public by voting? This seems to me like unusual punishment under the 8th. It’s unusual, irrelevant, and inappropriate punishment. If you’ve done your time, you’ve done your time. Or maybe the rationale is that a convicted criminal is going to vote for another criminal? Well, lots of unconvicted people have done that (hello, Duke Cunningham).
I realize that the Constitution says only that a state can’t prevent anyone from voting on the basis of sex, race, religion, ability to pay a poll tax, etc. But what in the Constitution prevents a state from saying that, say, people with outstanding library fines can’t vote?
Well, to use your example, a parolee may not be a danger to society by simply possessing a firearm (which IS a right under the 2nd amendment) but a state could argue that allowing a class of people (ex-felons) the vote could swing the elections to people unsuit for office.
Not that I agree, but you draw the line at possessing guns, and Florida draws it at voting. Seems like an issue for the legislatures, not the courts…
Well, I don’t have time at the moment to read all of them, but my question still stands: What’s to stop a state from disenfranchising someone for speeding? As Clegg says,
Ergo: “I think someone who speeds is untrustworthy. I think he should be stripped of his right to vote.”
“Untrustworthy”? How could a convict disrupt the “integrity of the ballot box”? Does that mean he’s going to go into the church basement on election day and change all of the votes? That’s nonsense.
If you really think that by committing a crime (which might be something like possession of marijuana), but then serving time, a person is no longer suitable to participate in the social contract, you might as well re-institute banishment.
Legal scholars: such an expensive education and they come up with crap like this.
My question is not wholly rhetorical, and the links above show some disagreement. So, I still ask: Can a state disenfranchise people who have gotten a speeding ticket?
Seems like “yes.” That is, unless someone takes it to the Supreme Court, and then what?
I was going to respond, and then I thought, wait a minute, **Gfactor ** posts links to lengthy arguments and discussion of the issue but **guizot ** can’t be bothered to read them before posting that the whole idea is crap? Why should I waste my time too?
There’s a long history of denying political rights to convicts and since all but two states do so in some form it certainly isn’t unusual punishment. And nothing in the constitution grants anyone the right to vote. A state could in theory prevent people from voting if they had overdue library books.
I could prepare a long annotation that analyzed the constitutional provisions and cases, but you wouldn’t have time to read it. Instead I’ll summarily quote this:
(Emphasis added.)
and leave you to work it out.
Hint: You’ll probably want to review some of the cases and commentary.
Well, no one’s twisting your arm. I’m trying to do four or five other things here, and I went through those very long links and I couldn’t find any definitive answer, and I was hoping someone (like alphaboi867) happened to be able to venture a sentence or two (presumably) from experience, summarized in normal discourse, not legalese that rambles on and on and avoiding a conclusion as long as possible. Don’t worry, teacher, I’ll do my homework.
Thanks Gfactor. I’ll read the cases; I wish they’d just make the conclusions clearer. Clerks must be paid by the word.
I’d read that before writing the OP.
I’m still wondering: because it’s a noun/prepositional phrase (“except for participation…in crime”), it has no tense. Especially since it mentions “rebellion.” Does that mean that every member of the Confederacy could have been stripped of the right to vote forever by any given state? Does it mean that once a person commits a crime, their citizenship can thereby be truncated for the rest of their life?
A large part of the problem on that occasion was they also excluded parolees from other states who did not have such an exclusion law, which they were specifically prohibited by their own legislation from doing.
And as **alphaboi867 ** rightly points out, this doesn’t directly forbid a scheme like the one you describe. It merely describes the consequences of schemes that limit the franchise.
I had to register for that, but I’ll keep it bookmarked. Thanks.
I’m still wondering how far a state could get in disenfranchising a person for speeding. Would it survive a Supreme Court test? What is a “crime,” and if once a criminal, always a criminal, and not a full citizen?
You know, these legal documents would be a lot more useful if they just said the conclusion first, and went through all the monotonous details of precedence later.
gfactor, the constitutional convention you describe in Louisiana was a consequence of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, not of the Fourteenth Amendment. The convention took place before the Amendment was ratified.
The Stetson cite is incorrect as to the provisions of the Louisiana Constitution of 1868. Louisiana never disenfranchised “all persons who had participated directly or indirectly in the War on the Confederate side”. The exact language of the Constitution of 1868 disqualified
A motley laundry list, to be sure, but not “all persons who had participated” in the rebellion–and even the persons effected could regain the vote by acknowledging “the late rebellion to have been politically wrong”.
The only impact of the subsequently ratified Fourteenth Amendment was to inoculate Louisiana against having its representation reduced in Congress. Louisiana repealed the disenfranchisement clauses in 1870.
guizot: States control suffrage requirements, subject only to the minimal federal Constitutional requirements that they not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age if over 18, or failure to pay taxes. In addition, a truly silly franchise law, divorced from any rational purpose (such as your speeding ticket example, or disenfranchising all persons whose last names begin with Q) would probably violate the Equal Protection clause. When existing felon disenfranchisement laws have been tested, the Supreme Court has found them not to violate the Equal Protection Clause or any of the other restrictions listed above. We can only speculate on where the exact line would be drawn between permissible and impermissible restrictions.
Funny you should mention that. Attorneys pay a ton of money for books that contain the court opinions, which are accompanied by something they call “headnotes.” These are brief summaries of the salient points of the case, put at the head of the printed case so that those who are on a budgeted amount of time can extract the relevant information quickly. These headnotes are then categorized according to an indexing scheme, and attorneys then pay even more money to own large numbers of volumes that contain each and every one of these headnotes, indexed according to the scheme. That way, you can see at a glance (glance being a relative term, for some points of law ) all of the cases that have pissed on that particular patch of ground. :eek:
First of all, in almost all states, speeding is a civil traffic infraction against your driver’s license, not necessarily you. I suppose a state could argue in court that a person who has been convicted of speeding showed a “poor judgement” and under the original understanding of the Constitution, a federal court wouldn’t even hear it.
Most states limited the vote to white male property owners over the age of 21. While the “white” “male” and “age 21” are all no good because of subsequent amendments, the property qualification could come back, IMHO.
In my opinion, while it would be the highest act of stupidity, a state should be able to set its own rules for voting provided it doesn’t violate federal constitutional limitations. So, yes, I would think it should pass muster for a state law taking away the vote to speeders. But that is a red herring of sorts. What state do you think has a majority in each house of its legislature, with a willing Governor, to pass such a restriction?
) all of the cases that have pissed on that particular patch of ground. :eek: