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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:
In my opinion, we should be limiting the franchise, not expanding it. Expanding it does not lead to improved outcomes, it only dilutes the votes of people who would make good judgements on which politicians we should be electing. Criminals, especially felons, have notoriously bad judgement. Why should we want their input on governing our society?
Yes, I already acknowledged this as an argument for restricting the franchise but my point here is that you should also justify the increased bureaucracy costs. Do you think it's worthwhile?
One thing I didn't touch upon is that it seems like a good policy to let ex-felons vote at least as a way to encourage them to be part of civil society again. Disenfranchising them seems like it would encourage them to just check out completely.
Wouldn’t you need to balance that out with cheaper elections (since there are less votes)? Also perhaps GOTV apparatuses would be smaller if the vote was held by a smaller percentage of the population. If people behind gotv could do something productive, that would be a net win.
Running elections seems to come with high fixed costs and low marginal costs, so it doesn't seem likely that additional votes would materially increase costs. Throwing additional votes into the tabulation machinery seems way cheaper than having real life bureaucrats carefully scrutinizing individual registrations as I outlined in my examples.
Campaigning though isn’t low marginal costs.
It is if the marginal campaign dollar is going on paid media (which, in America, it probably is)
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