I understand not letting convicts have driver’s licenses and gun permits and whatnot, but why aren’t they allowed to vote? It’s not an issue that makes me angry, it just confuses me. Who could possibly be harmed by letting a criminal vote? (We do let criminals run the country, after all…)
Is there some major issue that I’m just not thinking about, here, or what?
>> Why disallow convicts from voting?
Because they would vote for crooks? 
Um, because they lost that right…
Didn’t Cecil cover this?
Um, so they can’t vote because they aren’t allowed to. Thank you for the tautology. I think the question is why shouldn’t they be allowed to. That is, I guess, why should we keep interpreting the 14 amendment to exclude them- why is it a good idea.
Why? well, at the rate we’re incarcerating people the could be a pretty important voting block…
You’d have to completely rework that willie Horton commercial.
To be honest villains are probably amongst the least likely to bother voting anyway.
I’ve hardly ever heard a con talk about politics except to say that they hate anyone who promises to crack down hard on crime - maybe the latter is a good enough reason.
I would guess and say that since incarceration is a systematic removal of the right to self determination and because, in exercising that right they have trangressed society’s rules, they have shown themselves not worthy of the right the priveleges that responsible members of society are entitled.
casdave: “villains”? Interesting normative language, thanks. 
When one is prosecuted for a felony and is found guilty, one looses the right to vote because one chose to not fit in with society. It is a penalty for choosing to become a criminal. Convicts were getting welfare checks, if they were on welfare prior to getting convicted, and the last I heard, there was a movement to stop that also.
It is felt that if you are incarcerated, you don’t deserve the benefits of society. I agree. Murderers, child molesters, gang bangers, drug dealers, major thieves, con men, and others in jail for over 5 years should have no rights. They chose to rebel against organized society and reject the common laws of the land. In so doing, they loose their right to have any say in the common functions of society as a whole.
I left the vital comma out try,
To be honest, villains…
Or maybe
Frankly, most villains…
And that last sentence of mine sucks too
<deep sigh >
Actually, cas, I hadn’t even noticed the incongruity of “honest villains.” I was commenting on the word “villains” itself–just somewhat more loaded, I think, than “convicted felons.” I have this vision of all these disranchised people in top hats, twirling their waxed mustaches…
Disfranchised, I mean. Now I’ve got an image of all these people without ranches twirling their waxed top hats, etcetera.
When America started, the idea of being able to vote for ones leaders was not a given. I mean, that’s why we broke from England, after all.
Back then, we didn’t have 20% voter turnouts. People were proud to vote, glad to make their choices, and they realized how lucky they were to have that opportunity.
As such, it makes sense that a way to make a penalty severe would be to take away something people found so dear to them. It would have been a “deterrant” of sorts - at least as much as any sentence would be a deterrant - and for the times and attutudes present then, it would probably have made some patriots think twice about stealing a horse (or whatever).
So we are now at a point where we are apathetic and don’t really care about voting. But despite this, losing that right has stayed with us, probably out of tradition. I mean, why bother repealing it? Even though it doesn’t have the effectiveness it once might have had, why spend time to change it?
Yer pal,
Satan
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ok. I’ve worked with convicts for 20+ years. Guess what? they vote for the same issues you do. They’re still people, some still are allowed to vote (as Cecil states in his article). They have families. They care about the schools their kids go to. They care about the roads we all drive on. They care about the parks, availabiltiy of public services. they care about taxes. they work (both on the outside and while locked up). They probably have washed your car at the carwash, packed your sandwhich at the drive through, helped make the jack that went into your car, painted the office building you work at etc.
…I would suspect that some (not necessarily me) might see this as a racial issue…the percentage of black men incarcerated is significantly higher, than that say of white men…
“Divided by a common language” eh ?
Villain is in common usage over here maybe less so on the other side, maybe it seems a little antiquated. We South Yorkshire folk do talk in what is regarded as an old fashioned manner using thee, thou, thine and many other elderly terms.
I used villain because I didn’t want to be repeating “convict” throughout my post especially as I had no idea how long it would be.
In fact there are only a handful of moustachioed, dark-eyed rotters in my jail and hardly any of those have ever tied maidens to railway tracks - but then there would hardly be any point given the poor reliability of our system, the victim would likely die of exposure first.
Racism? Possibly. See Manny’s article linked by porcupine, above, for a starting point on thatissue.
However, there are also the issues of representation. (I doubt that they were considered when convicts were disenfranchised, but they would certainly be an issue if you wanted convict suffrage.) A lot of prisons are out in the hinterlands. Would prisoners vote in the districts where they live? In some cases, they would make up a substantial plurality of the voters of a district. (It would not be too bad for Stateville in IL, (Joliet is a good-sized town) and it might even make perverse sense at Jackson, MI, where a lot of inmates were “recruited” locally (although by no means a majority). However, at Lucasville, OH, the prison would have a serious effect on the local voting patterns (they are probably the majority in at least the prison’s voting precinct).)
Conversely, do they vote according to their last residence? What about a lifer who will never go “home”?
Another issue would involve the vote being tainted. You have hundreds of people in a single location under the coercive influence of both the prison administration and the various gangs that are run among the prisoners. There would constantly be claims that the votes were either solicited or coerced (by anyone who was defeated by the margins of the prison vote).
My guess would be that prisoner suffrage has never been a serious matter of consideration. I suspect that “everyone” has merely “assumed” that prisoners don’t vote.
The issue of whether convicted felons may vote after release has been thought about, and there is (as Manny noted) a real hodge-podge of laws among the states enabling or denying convicted felons rights to vote. But I doubt that voting by prisoners has been given much consideration historically–although I note that four states do allow it. (Which four state allow convicts to vote? Where are their prisons? In which elections are they allowed to vote? National? State? County? School board?)
I’m not questioning your conclusion, but I am questioning your figure. Do we really know what voter turnout rates where then, as a percentage of eligible voters? Were they significantly higher? Keep in mind, after we gained our independence, only white male landowners were allowed to vote anyway.
casdave:
You misspelled “gaol.” 
As it happens, I presented a paper last year which dealt with this topic. Basically, even as a percentage of the eligible electorate, voter turnout in this country was only very high during the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, culminating with McKinley’s Front Porch campaign in 1896. Even then, though close to ninety percent of the eligible voters cast their preference in the national election, such turnout was largely the result of organized campaigns by precinct bosses to get out the vote–which sometimes entailed the buying of votes, and which certainly entailed the bosses escorting prospective voters to the polling centers and watching to ensure they made the correct choice. All in all, not a period of democratic enlightenment, even forgetting about the de facto disfranchisement of blacks, and the de jure disfranchisement of women.
What gets me is those ten states mentioned in the column that permanently disfranchise felons. Where is the justice in that? If you’re going to let them out of jail on the assumption that they’ve “paid their debt to society”, where is the logic in continuing to deny them the franchise? We restore ex-cons to the enjoyment of their other rights—why not the right to vote?
(Okay, so we also limit or remove some or all of their Second Amendment rights—many states say that nobody convicted of a felony can own a gun again, ever. But that has some reasonably pragmatic basis, at least—I’m a lot more afraid of a felon carrying a gun than of a felon casting a vote. Is there any reason to regard permanent disfranchisement of felons as anything except stupid, useless tough-on-crime posturing?)
Phil: I just realized I didn’t answer part of your question. I’ll do so with a tautology: I don’t know how historical voter turnout is determined–especially before, say, 1876–but it’s possible to the extent that Congressional Quarterly’s almanacs of American politics list those figures with some authority (really, they’ve got footnotes and everything!). So I don’t know how it’s done, except that it’s done. I suppose we could find out.
That being said, I think Satan’s analysis of the situation is lacking a bit of context. Brian, what period were you talking about when you said that “people were proud to vote, glad to make their choices, and they realized how lucky they were to have this opportunity?” Would this be ante-bellum? Turn of the century? 1950s? When? I don’t know that this has ever broadly been true–perhaps for first-generation immigrants?–so I need a bit more in order to evaluate the claim.
For an amusing take on a somewhat relevant matter, check out this week’s Tom the Dancing Bug.
Kimstu, I agree with you; I think Manny was spot on in the Mailbag piece when he cited inertia and a reluctance, however perverse, to seeming “soft on crime” as the main obstacles to allowing paroled felons to vote. Personally, I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t–and I think some societal harm is being reaped because they can’t, in the form of inadvertant minority disfranchisement.
