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
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Removing the right to vote from felons means you create a class of society that can no longer represent themselves, and must trust non-felons to represent their interests.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“You create a class that can no longer represent themselves” you dont, they did it when they chose to break the law.
It is not a different problem, it’s one and the same.
Breaking the law is a complicated situation, and focusing on punishment instead of rehabilitation is draconian and borderline fascist. Everyone should be able to represent themselves via voting, if they are of age.
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
Sure there is, it promotes candidets to go for those votes.
My whole point is that this doesn’t matter unless the prison population is high enough. . .and if it’s so high that this is actually a large enough to actually really sway a politician, then that almost certainly means there is something wrong with the system that is imprisoning so many people. It’s like my point was just completely ignored.
But if that is what you want, why have laws at all?
Going from “they should retain the right to vote” to “no laws at all” is the most mindless logical jump I’ve heard in a bit. Well, not quite, I was recently arguing with someone who actually argued that someone who says “I don’t support Trump or Biden” means they are actually a Trump supporter and just lying when they say they don’t support Trump. That was dumber, but your jump is pretty close to that.
