If he is convicted of a felony and does run for president again, then he won't be able to vote, right?
Maybe it'll be an impetus to create a clearer path for convicted felons who served their time and don't reoffend to regain their voting rights. Probably not, but it would be nice.
Convicted felons should 100% be allowed to vote though. I never quite understood the fear of letting them vote. Indeed keeping them engaged in society instead of ostracizing them feels like it helps prevent them from reoffending.
I think the idea of suspending voting rights is less about "punishment" than it is about preventing those who have demonstrated that they're willing to make choices that we've agreed are harmful to other people from voting in ways that are aligned with their poor judgment.
In practice, I think most states with laws that suspend voting rights, do so as a form of punishment. That certainly seems to be the case with states that permanently suspend voting rights even after a convicted felon has served their time.
I personally think felons currently serving time shouldn't be allowed to vote. Suspending that right temporarily seems reasonable. That's not a strong conviction I hold though. I could be convinced that voting is a right as fundamental as the other rights we still extend felons while incarcerated.
Once a felon has completed their sentence I think they should have full voting rights restored. I also think they should no longer be considered a felon, to the point where their records are sealed once they've served their sentence. The idea of "once a felon, always a felon" seems counter productive towards rehabilitation and reengaging someone in society, and simply vindictive. In most states, being convicted of a felony comes with an automatic, unspoken life sentence of always being a felon, where the ostracization continues until they die. That doesn't seem healthy for anyone, let alone the person who served their time.
* Prisoners can't vote; however, a court decided under the Human Rights Act that they should be allowed to, but so far the government has ignored this
* Once released, ex-prisoners can vote as usual
* Many convictions are "spent" after a certain amount of time [1], meaning that after that you don't need to disclose them when applying for a job etc (but nothing resulting in a prison sentence of four years or more, and there are some cases where you still have to disclose them)
As far as i know, nobody thinks any of this is a problem.
> it is about preventing those who have demonstrated that they're willing to make choices that we've agreed are harmful to other people from voting in ways that are aligned with their poor judgment.
So if you lose all your money because of poor decisions, you should also lose your ability to vote right? If you get take in by an obvious scam or cult, you should lose your right to vote too, no?
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said in the rest of the post, but this reasoning seems critically flawed because there are lots of people with fatally poor judgement and we don’t take away their voting rights. Singling out people who have ended up on the wrong side of the criminal justice system for this punitive take is flawed. They’re already being punished and removed from society. If anything, giving criminals a right to participate in government makes the government accountable to how they treat prisoners (it’s truly a dire situation here in the US) and how they choose to apply laws. Maybe we would have learned how bad the drug laws were much earlier if the government didn’t have the power to strip voting rights from citizens.
Additionally, the government makes a non trivial amount of mistakes in terms of incarcerating innocent people. So there’s a large number of people who are disenfranchised without demonstrating “bad judgement”.
Unfortunately, I may have led you astray. I should have tried to make it clear that I was making a guess as to the rationale behind suspending voting rights - one that I don't 100% agree with. I was just echoing what supporters of that particular line of thinking have said.
Having had more time to think about it, I really can't get behind any reason for suspending voting rights.
What's the actual risk of letting those serving time vote? That they'll vote for their interests? That they might use poor judgement? If that's the concern, we have a lot more people who aren't in prison who vote for their interests and demonstrate poor judgement already.
I think that those in favor of suspending voting rights have one motivation: it's just another injustice on a pile of injustices meant to separate people in the "prison system" from "normal society," causing more harm than good for actual society.
Worse it creates incentives to convict people who are likely to be political opponents to prevent them from voting. This practice also removes a voice from one of the most vulnerable groups in society, the incarcerated.
Like many things, it ties back to the failure of Reconstruction.
Many felony disenfranchisement laws were passed alongside Black Codes.
7.4 percent of African American adults are disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of those who are not African American.
Many but not all states put conditions on such voting. As you might expect, the severity of a state's restrictions correlates with its political leanings.
Maybe it'll be an impetus to create a clearer path for convicted felons who served their time and don't reoffend to regain their voting rights. Probably not, but it would be nice.