Why Can’t Felons Vote?

Why Cant Felons Vote?
A troubling story that has not gotten much attention this election season — or any recent one, for that matter — is why a certain group of roughly
5.3 million Americans won’t be allowed to vote. It isn’t because they’re
underage or non-citizens or mentally incompetent. It isn’t because they’re
unregistered or physically unable to get to the polls. It isn’t even because
they’re limping around with a chronic case of political apathy.

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The reason they can’t vote is that they’re felons.

Oh, well. Felons, you say. They’re criminals, for Pete’s sake. Of course
they shouldn’t have the right to vote. But why is that, exactly?

In places like Mississippi, one of 12 states that permanently bar at least
some felons from voting, the reason typically involves the notion that
people have displayed very bad judgment by committing a felony, by
definition a serious crime. No argument there. But having done so, the
thinking goes, they have also proven themselves unfit to make one of life’s
most important decisions: choosing the nation’s leaders. As Roger Clegg,
president of the conservative advocacy group Center for Equal Opportunity,
neatly puts it, “If you aren’t willing to follow the law, you can’t claim
the right to make the law for everyone else.”

Officials in Mississippi are so taken with this slogan that they recently
piled 11 disqualifying felonies onto the 10 listed in their state’s
constitution. The Mississippi attorney general said they could do so without
actually amending the constitution, based on his creative reading of a 1998
federal court decision, but the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed. On Oct. 9, it filed a
lawsuit in Hinds County, Mississippi, challenging the 11 additions,
including shoplifting and timber larceny, as improperly adopted.

Notice that the ACLU didn’t challenge the 10 felonies already in the state
constitution. That’s because it is generally legal for states to
disenfranchise felons — the U.S. Constitution says so.

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