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Notes -
This isn't really the principal argument why felons should have the vote. It's a pragmatic one about perverse incentive. If the government can deprive people of the vote by convicting them of a particular crime, oopsie, you've created an incentive for the government to drum up those exact kinds of charges against political opponents.
I think the far more important part of imprisoning political opponents would be removing them from the political battlefield rather than get rid of their 1 vote among millions. In order to get an appreciable effect on the vote counts, you'd have to imprison so many opposition members there's no one left to vote for anyway.
As I said in another prong of this thread, I do agree that this is mostly symbolic in either direction - but I care about the government going the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety w. regards to the franchise. In any case I didn't necessarily mean to die on the hill of this particular argument, merely to point out that in my experience that is the principal argument in favor of letting felons have the vote, as opposed to concern about their inalienable human rights yada yada.
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I think if we're getting into taking out political opponents, drumming up charges is already well established. Think of all the TRUMP IS A FELON! 39 FELONIES! stuff and tell me at least some of those weren't politically motivated? And I'm sure there are cases for Democrats getting stalked as well.
Gosh, we're going to let the prisoners vote, we're sure a bunch of druggies, thieves, and gangsters will respect the electoral process and nobody will be motivated to intervene, bribe, buy or sell votes, etc. Yeah, unless you let them all out of jail for the day to visit the polling booths, I don't see how you can guarantee the integrity of the voting process. And letting a bunch of convicts out on day release to vote is likely to end up with "scarpered" rather than "placed my ballot in the box".
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Sure but there is also the pragmatic argument of “criminals have proven themselves to be asocial and thus shouldn’t vote.”
We have very little evidence the government is trying to put people in jail for your concern. We have a lot of evidence the vast majority of criminals are in fact asocial scum. So this is a slope I’m not particularly worried about being slippery.
Yeah, I almost added a parenthetical about how it obviously wasn't a live concern in today's America, particularly. But I think it's one of those things where the government ought to avoid the appearance of a perverse incentive, as one of the many nested redundancies keeping us from a slide into tyranny. Caesar's wife must be above approach, etc. etc. (Indeed, this is especially persuasive to me on this issue because convicted felons represent a largely symbolic percentage of the vote in any case, so it can't do much harm to go the extra mile to prove the government's commitment to democracy.)
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