voting rights

[swan_tower]

Maybe gollumgollum can explain this one to me, since she's studied the U.S. prison system.

I read a post recently by a guy who was convicted of a felony some years ago, did his time, got out. He apparently volunteers for political work regularly, "get out the vote" efforts -- because he can't vote. And I think that was the first time I discovered that felons in prison are not permitted to vote, and depending on the state they live in, cannot vote for some variable amount of time after they've been released.

I don't understand why.

I know that our legal system is based on a principle of punishing offenders by stripping them of various freedoms and rights. On the whole, I prefer that to the principle of subjecting them to physical torment, say, or other options societies have tried throughout the centuries. But I'm not sure I get, let alone agree with, stripping them of the right to vote. Maybe it's because I view that as a responsibility as much as a privilege. Maybe it's because our entire prison system is kind of broken to begin with. But I just don't get it. It isn't like saying convicted pedophiles shouldn't be allowed to live within five miles of an elementary school; I doubt these felons used their voting rights to commit their crimes.

Once you've done your time, what conceivable argument is there for not being allowed to participate in democracy again?

(What argument is there for not being allowed to participate while doing time? Are we afraid somebody will organize a prisoner voting bloc to pass some law favorable to them?)

This particular story had a happy ending; the guy in question had just discovered that in his state, he was in fact eligible to vote again. There was joy radiating from my screen, I swear. This is a guy who desperately cares about his country, who wants to do everything he can to be a part of it again. Denying ex-felons the right to vote, as far as I can see, only serves to ostracize them further, and hinder them from becoming productive members of society again.

Comments

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

The rationale behind it is generally that felons have abrogated their responsibility to society by committing especially heinous crimes, so therefore don't deserve to have a say in what that society does. In principle this actually makes a kind of sense to me. Someone who's killed another person (except by total accident) has shown a basic lack of judgment and caution; I don't want that person having a say in how the rest of us live our lives. Even if they've gone to prison -- hell, especially if they've gone to prison, because our prison system doesn't reform criminals, it makes them worse.

The problem is how felon disenfranchisement is implemented in practice. For one thing, the definition of a felony varies wildly across states, to the point that the crimes often aren't particularly heinous or society-damaging. In some states possessing a small amount of marijuana counts as a felony, while possessing an equal amount of cocaine (a much more damaging drug, but one used more often by the wealthy than the poor) does not. I used to live in a state where the theft or damage of any property over $250 counted as a felony. The law dated from way back when $250 was a lot of money, but these days $250 is nothing. If I borrow a friend's XBox and somehow screw it up, and that friend gets mad at me and calls the cops, I could lose my right to vote. Somehow that doesn't strike me as a heinous crime against society, yet that's how it works.

A bigger problem is that many of these laws were enacted after the passage of the 15th Amendment (the one giving blacks the right to vote), along with things like voter literacy tests, etc., as part of an overall strategy to reduce the potential power of the black vote. And areas of the country which keep these laws on the books tend to be those with a high population of black or poor citizens, where the wealthy whites in power feel threatened for control of the local government. So you usually see felon disenfranchisement in the same places where you see weird gerrymandering to increase the voting power of wealthy white neighborhoods over poor or PoC ones, etc.

Your friend is a good example of another part of the problem: misinformation. Many officials in the criminal justice system tell prisoners and ex-prisoners that they've lost the right to vote when this is in fact not true. Many prisoners don't know where to get correct information about this; they just believe the guards or parole officers (or conservative politicians) who tell them this crap, who might very well be misinformed themselves (or maliciously spreading disinformation).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

But there are plenty of non-felons whose judgment and caution is equally suspect, if not moreso. <g> We don't require an IQ test or even a common sense test to vote. And I'd trust that logic a lot more if I believed that everybody in prison actually deserved to be there. (See also: your examples of felony differences.)

You hit on something that I forgot to say in the original post, though, which is that there's an inescapable class/race component to this situation, given that the prison population is disproportionately poor and non-white. It makes me think of the attitude I've been catching a whiff of, namely, that this election will somehow be "skewed" because African-Americans (and Latinos, too) are turning out in droves to vote. Me, I'm cheering on the fact that a demographic which usually feels its votes don't count is so energized. If black votes turn out to make up a disproportionate part of the electorate, well, that just says to me that we need to get the other parts off their asses, too. But those votes count just as much as anybody else's. And if they vote for things the rich white folks don't like, well, that's how democracy works.

Unless you're in prison, apparently.

(This was not, for the record, a friend. The post was a diary on The Daily Kos, made by a community member when he discovered he was eligible after all.)

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

But there are plenty of non-felons whose judgment and caution is equally suspect, if not moreso. We don't require an IQ test or even a common sense test to vote.

Oh, I agree 100%. I'd love to disqualify people like this (YouTube) who believe every half-baked illogical rumor on the web, and conjure up generations-deep conspiracy theories, and are just generally morons. -_-

t makes me think of the attitude I've been catching a whiff of, namely, that this election will somehow be "skewed" because African-Americans (and Latinos, too) are turning out in droves to vote. Me, I'm cheering on the fact that a demographic which usually feels its votes don't count is so energized. If black votes turn out to make up a disproportionate part of the electorate, well, that just says to me that we need to get the other parts off their asses, too.

Yeah, I've heard this stuff too. I was expecting it at about this point, actually.

See, thing is, "disproportionate" is a very revealing term, when you listen to the people who use it in this context. Disproportionate is a statistical term, implying a comparison against a norm. So what norm do these people have in mind? What would a large PoC vote be disproportionate to? The US population? That's not possible; if every eligible black, Latina/o, Asian, etc. citizen turns out to vote, that will simply be "proportionate". It could only be disproportionate if there was rampant voter fraud and a lot of us got to vote twice or something, and that would be a whole other problem. (Of course, the same people arguing about a "disproportionate" turnout are also trying to imply that there is rampant voter fraud, to justify their efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters for "errors" like using their middle initial or a nickname on forms.)

Or is a high PoC vote disproportionate compared to history? Well, since PoC in America have historically under-voted, leading to a disproportionate underrepresentation, then anything which corrects this is again not disproportionate, it's correcting disproportion.

Yet that's what these people seem to be implying -- that this historical underrepresentation is the norm against which we should all be comparing. So it's only "disproportionate" if you believe that PoC underrepresentation is a good, normal thing.

It's sad, really. We've never been a democracy, for all our bragging about it -- mostly because whenever we actually try, people start acting like efforts to get everyone to vote are undemocratic.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The norm I have in mind is whatever total the subset comes out of. For inmates, I compare them against the total U.S. population; for votes cast, I compare against the eligible electorate and/or registered voters (depending on the question). Which means that, in the normal way of things, black voters are usually disproportionately under-represented: they make up a smaller percentage of voters than they do of the eligible electorate. If it happens that every eligible PoC turns out and they cast (the following figures are made up) 50% of the votes when they make up 40% of the population, I would also call that disproportionate. But unlike the people generally talking about this, the only problem I have with it is that it means we still have a bunch of people not exercising their right to vote. In the meantime, I'm cheering on all those PoCs who have made their voices heard.

If this boosted turnout just means PoC voters are turning out in about the same numbers as whites -- say, 75% of both groups vote -- well, that's good progress, and in the meantime let's try to get that other 25% out there, too. Unfortunately, you're right: a lot of people would call that disproportionate, too.