Vote to make whatever crime they committed legal. Or, they might vote against white politicians; as already pointed out denying felons the vote amounts to systematically disenfranchising millions of non-whites given how racist our “justice” system has always been.
So why not take things a step further and allow everyone in the world affected by US policies to vote in US elections? Let the billions have a vote.
If enough people are comfortable enough to live in a jurisdiction without these laws that they are willing to vote for a politician that would repeal the law, should they not have that right?
You might add Canada to the list of counter-examples. All convicts in Canada have the right to vote in all elections, federal, provincial, and municipal. I’ve not seen any suggestion that it’s had any detrimental effect.
Sure.
I’ll wait.
Let me know when it starts.
I offered a suggestion here.
Also, you also never answered the question about how you feel about the rights of child molesters to be in the proximity of your own children. Certain specific offenses may justify lifetime consequences in the interest of public safety, and that could reasonably include such things as bans on gun ownership or driving. But a ban on voting is a ban on something that is totally unrelated to the offense, and is supposed to apply to all felons regardless of what they were convicted of. It’s a completely different scenario than specific and rationally crafted bans that are narrow in scope, and has no rational justification that I can see.
Isn’t that how democracy works?
I’m a bit confused by this response. I took your initial quote in post 16 to indicate that it would be objectionable to let felons vote as they would vote to repeal the laws that they were breaking. Your response to be seems to indicate that you don’t think that would actually happen thus rendering your initial objection nonsensical. Can you clarify?
Currently a matter of conflict in Europe too. The human rights court ECHR has ruled that the UKs blanket exemption is unlawful. The UK government has been dragging its feet for over a decade to avoid implementing this decision. Soon the court will start ordering damages to prisoners for being denied their right to vote.
Well, if a more plausible alternative to pirates and counterfeiters is needed, is there a reasonable concern that citizens convicted of drug-related offenses (and there are a lot of them in the U.S.) could vote toward legalizing drugs (something already tentatively underway in several states)?
Is that a problem?
Problem with that theory is the felons have been disenfranchised for more than 140 years. Felons lost all civil rights in medieval Europe before the United States ever existed.
You’re not looking. The rational justification is that the felon chooses to blatantly disregard the body politic by committing a serious crime.
Sure. And felony disenfranchisement is also imposed by democratic means. So, we’re all good.
Yes. You said:
I took “repeal the law,” to mean repeal the law disenfranchising felons. But rereading your reply makes it clear that was an error on my part.
So now that I understand what you meant: no, because “enough people” includes the pirates and counterfeiters, who should not have that right.
That might fly as a “rational basis” for a disenfranchisement law, but how is it rational in the everyday use of the term?
To be clear, this quote is not mine.
I offered it up without attribution because I thought its provenance was well-known, but I may have been mistaken as to its fame.
Representative Eckley, in speaking to the House in support of the Fourteenth Amendment’s §2, is the author. In other words, this was a historical quote, the rationale offered in support of the constitutional clause allowing felony disenfranchisement.
Define the “everyday” use of the term for me.
Okay: what benefit do you derive personally from preventing someone who committed an assault in his twenties from voting in his forties?
ETA: to cover the alternative, what harm do you personally suffer if he votes?
If you go back far enough in history there is no shortage of institutional cruelty and violence, irrationality, and all manner of injustices. That’s not an argument for regressing back to those times.
I think my point is a valid one because racists have been systematically trying to disenfranchise blacks ever since the passage of the 15th Amendment, using every tactic from outright threats to “voter literacy tests” which no white person ever had to take. With the predilection of all-white southern juries to convict blacks of just about anything they had been charged with, one can only imagine how well the principle of felony disenfranchisement sat with the racist crowd.
I assume that was more of a joke than a serious comment. Your hypothesis about a state comprised of pirates and counterfeiters voting according to their values was a description of how the majority always prevails in a properly functioning democracy in which the process is, in fact, democratic. You don’t have to like the outcome and the outcome may indeed be stupid, but as Churchill said, democracy is the least bad of all possible systems of government.
So yes, felony disenfranchisement if it exists in a democracy is presumably the outcome of a democratic process (though in the US, increasingly, it no longer exists to any great extent). But if it does exist, it doesn’t mean it’s right and while I have to accept it I’m still allowed to argue against it and try to change it through the same democratic process. That phrase is key: through the same democratic process. You don’t try to influence the outcomes in a democracy by disenfranchising demographic sectors like blacks or felons who you think might vote for policies that you happen to dislike. But with respect to blacks this has been going on, as I said, for more than 140 years.
His willingness to hurt someone badly enough to qualify for felony assault, combined with his unwillingness to take any kind of personal action to get his voting rights back, identifies him as an unconcerned voter. I suffer harm because his vote is coming from someone who doesn’t much care about the value of voting, and his decisions are likely to suffer a similar lack of concern for the health of the body politic.
How does your “valid point,” reconcile the disenfranchisement of felons before the fifteenth amendment, then?
It seems to me your point is:
- in the past, lots of stuff was cruel
- then racists
- QED, racism!
In other words, you lump two concepts together without specifically rebutting the point that felony disenfranchisement existed well before US-racists were born, but felony disenfranchisement is still the result of racism.
Because the principle of universal suffrage is largely the outgrowth of relatively recent progressive modernism. In the past, there was a much greater tendency for those in power to see voting as a privilege that should be accorded only to a like-minded faction. Blacks, women, and those not owning property were excluded as a matter of routine. Moreover, there has always been a racially motivated interest in disenfranchising blacks. After the 15th Amendment, it became a little harder, and after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, harder still – so various pretexts (and illegal means) had to be employed.
I don’t want to overstress the idea that felony disenfranchisement is all racially motivated as I don’t think it is, but I do think it was a contributing factor to its popular support. The real point I think is worth repeating: You don’t try to influence the outcomes in a democracy by disenfranchising demographic sectors like blacks or felons who you think might vote for policies that you happen to dislike. I think the modern view that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century is that universal suffrage is a cornerstone of true democracy.
What a shame, then, that this “modern view” isn’t shared by enough people to end felon disenfranchisement, eh?
Or could it be that YOUR modern view isn’t actually THE modern view?