Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont submitted the legislation, named the Inclusive Democracy Act, on Tuesday which would guarantee the right to vote in federal elections for all citizens regardless of their criminal record.
In a statement, Pressley said the legislation was necessary due to policies and court rulings that “continue to disenfranchise voters from all walks of life — including by gutting the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, cuts to early voting, and more.” Welch called the bill necessary due to “antiquated state felony disenfranchisement laws.”
In late 2022, approximately 4.6 million people were unable to vote due to a felony conviction, according to a study by the Sentencing Project, a nonpartisan research group. The same study found that Black and Hispanic citizens are disproportionately likely to be disenfranchised due to felony
What third world shit is that? You can’t vote if you’ve been convicted of a felony? That’s some medieval thinking right there, god the US is a hopeless barbaric mess only thinly disguised as a democracy.
It gets worse. Many of the felony disenfranchisement laws originate from the civil war era. Combine that with the 13th amendment still allowing slavery as a punishment for crime and you can take a guess who was overwhelmingly targeted.
Well fucking yea! You lose your rights as soon as you do stupid things… Behave in the society if you dont want this to happen to you…
Removing the right to vote from felons means you create a class of society that can no longer represent themselves, and must trust non-felons to represent their interests. This is inherently anti-democratic thought and is fundamentally an abhorrent thought process, especially considering false convictions are more common than one would expect.
“False convictions are more common that one would expect” that is a different problem that needs a different solution.
“You create a class that can no longer represent themselves” you dont, they did it when they chose to break the law.
If the felon population is so high that it really is going to represent a threat that they might be able to band together and vote as a bloc to get some candidate elected…well your legal system is fucked up and this is probably good. If it isn’t that high, then it doesn’t matter.
There is no good reason to remove the right to vote. It’s just meant as punishment, and I doubt it acts as much it a deterrence because who is going to be thinking about their right to vote when committing a crime?
Sure there is, it promotes candidets to go for those votes. Making laws less severe and a broken society as consequence… But if that is what you want, why have laws at all? In the end the people who brake them can chose candidets who would remove them. Ask Portland OR how is their “every drug is legal” law working, zombie town if you go downtown. I guess that is what is important? Good luck
Yes you fucking can, in fact, voting rights is just about the easiest right to restore once your off paper and paid all your restitution and fines. (Which can be goddam hard. But it is doable.)
Source; I’m an ex fucking convict lol. I’ll have my gun rights back next year if all goes well.
