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I write in favor of letting criminals vote. The main argument is that gatekeeping the franchise is not easy and requires a lot of state capacity to securely enforce it. Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote, and I generally don't find arguments to restrict it to be very convincing:
Beyond whether or not disenfranchisement is the right thing to do, there's also the question of implementation:
And beyond implementation by the state, there's also the question of how normal people are expected to navigate the cobwebs:
And finally:
I largely agree with your overall point, but I want to have a stab at this. I assume it's rhetorical, but obviously, for the lay people: this is the whole point of law in the first place. Honest free men can't be coerced as easily as criminals can. When everything is potentially criminal, government has achieved normality and can focus on fighting over who gets to selectively enforce which laws. This is why we have a legal profession, because if laws were easy enough for the people who are supposed to be following them to understand, it wouldn't be necessary.
This quote of yours is damning, and true, but it's true of every law. It's a fully generalizable argument, because law is designed, intended and implemented to be impenetrable and to criminalize as much as possible.
I don't disagree that this is a risk, but I would pushback on how generalizable it is. Almost all my criminal caseload involves acts that are unambiguously wrong (dude stabs a guy, man shoots a gun, woman shoplifts, etc.) where the accused is not at all surprised that they're being charged with a crime. Granted, edge cases exist (esp. self-defense) but I don't think every law can be accused of being impenetrable to the common person.
Only because in the main, the legal force of the law is enforced in ways that accord with the public morality. This is what gives it "legitimacy". You know as well as I that if all the laws on all the books were enforced equally and to the full extent, the government would fall tomorrow. It is only by not enforcing the vast majority of the law (which criminalizes the entire population) that the powerful can selectively choose the exceptions to that rule. The unlucky few to get charged with some obscure statute that gets used once a decade or so. It's a handy tool to have, deciding who is a criminal and who isn't based on your own personal (and influenced/lobbied/payed etc.) opinion.
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