I like this article. Zim.
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Should Felons Vote?
http://www.city-journal.org/html/should-felons-vote-12868.html
Forty-eight states currently restrict the right of felons to vote. Most states forbid current inmates to vote, others extend such bans to parolees, and still others disenfranchise felons for life. A movement to overturn these restrictions gained swift momentum during the 2004 presidential campaign, and pending legal and legislative measures promise to keep the issue in the headlines in the months to come. It hasn’t escaped notice that the felon vote would prove a windfall for the Democrats; when they do get to vote, convicts and ex-cons tend to pull the lever for the Left. Had ex-felons been able to vote in Florida in 2000—the state permanently strips all felons of voting rights—Al Gore almost certainly would have won the presidential election.
Murderers, rapists, and thieves might seem to be an odd constituency for a party that prides itself on its touchy-feely concern for women and victims. But desperate times call for desperate measures. After three national electoral defeats in a row, the Democrats need to enlarge their base. If that means reaching out to lock in the pedophile and home-invader vote, so be it. Even newly moderate Democrat Hillary Clinton has recently endorsed voting rights for ex-cons. This is inclusiveness with a vengeance.
The liberal advocates and Democratic politicians seeking the enfranchisement of felons deny any narrow political motivation, of course. Their interest is moral, they claim: it is just wrong to deny felons the vote. Their various arguments in support of this conclusion, though, fail to persuade.
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First, as legal writer Roger Clegg notes, many of the same studies appealed to by felon advocates show that the policy of disenfranchising felons is as old as ancient Greece and Rome; it made its way to these shores not long after the American Revolution. By the time of the Civil War, 70 percent of the states already had such laws.
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Such countries devalue the franchise by throwing it away on murderers and other criminals, whose fellow citizens’ blood is still fresh on their hands. Such hands can only defile a ballot. If the right to vote is as precious as felon advocates claim to believe it is, we should expect people to uphold at least some minimum moral standards in order to keep it—such as refraining from violating their fellow voters’ own inalienable rights.
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(As I said, I like this article. Zim.)
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