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Why Can't Felons Vote?
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1553510,00.html
The reason they can't vote is that they're felons.
Oh, well. Felons, you say. They're criminals, for Pete's sake. Of course they shouldn't have the right to vote. But why is that, exactly?
In places like Mississippi, one of 12 states that permanently bar at least some felons from voting, the reason typically involves the notion that people have displayed very bad judgment by committing a felony, by definition a serious crime. No argument there. But having done so, the thinking goes, they have also proven themselves unfit to make one of life's most important decisions: choosing the nation's leaders. As Roger Clegg, president of the conservative advocacy group Center for Equal Opportunity, neatly puts it, "If you aren't willing to follow the law, you can't claim the right to make the law for everyone else."
Officials in Mississippi are so taken with this slogan that they recently piled 11 disqualifying felonies onto the 10 listed in their state's constitution. The Mississippi attorney general said they could do so without actually amending the constitution, based on his creative reading of a 1998 federal court decision, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed. On Oct. 9, it filed a lawsuit in Hinds County, Mississippi, challenging the 11 additions, including shoplifting and timber larceny, as improperly adopted.
Notice that the ACLU didn't challenge the 10 felonies already in the state constitution. That's because it is generally legal for states to disenfranchise felons — the U.S. Constitution says so. (OK, not in so many words, but that's how the Supreme Court reads section two of the 14th Amendment.)
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(Article does continue. Zim.)
(Also, it looks like most of the authors of the
articles I find to date are looking for ways to
restore felons 'right to vote'.)
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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