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.
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.
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”.
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.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-ri...
