given how little one vote matter, it seems to me that stripping felons of their right to vote is both petty and counterproductive if the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
Also, seems kind of scary that this implies a future where so many people are in prison that their vote could actually tip the balance ?
That’s not the point. If everyone believes their one vote doesn’t matter then yes, continue on with this futile thinking as it will surely not make a difference.
Ideally, it is one divided by population. In practice, because of the electoral college, and because money is speech are corporation are people, it is still way way less than 0.000’000’003
Not just voting but having that blot on the record FOREVER puts a scarlet letter on their forehead. Good luck getting a good job and having a future when you’ve been in prison a few years for a nonviolent drug crime that should’ve been solved with a few weeks/months of inpatient rehab. Our entire criminal justice system in the US just breeds more crime and generational cyclical poverty. Hooray.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I am assuming you are talking about the USA.
Why would both be considered bad, but one least bad than the other? Having only two major parties makes for little choices, but why you think its never a good choice?
From what I can grasp from here in Europe, the current president Biden is not bad at all.
I live in Europe, even with more parties it’s still a matter of “least bad” usually - like here in Sweden I find it really hard to find a party that is anti-religion, anti-monarchy and pro-science and education but also not lenient on violent gang crime and open borders. I also disagree greatly with the current unfair rent control system and the high income taxes (with no property, land or inheritance taxes), but there is literally no party that covers even just those 3-4 issues in the same way (and there are like 5 or 6 viable parties!).
I think the bigger issue with Biden is that there’s just no change at all - no attempt to solve the biggest day-to-day issues of heatlhcare, housing and education. And from the point of view of Europe, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has been terrible, directly subsidising industry to move to the US, right when Europe is struggling with the Russian gas crisis and the pipelines were bombed, etc.
I hate it when people say that I’m “throwing my vote away by voting for a 3rd party”. If everyone voted for the person they actually liked, rather than the person who’s likely to beat the other large party, maybe we’d see some better choices.
That title needs a lot of editing. It does end in a question mark, but it’s structured like a statement. Even if it is a question, it appears that your asking if it seems that way way to you. How is anyone else supposed to know how it seems to you?
Not always, could be for drug possession, vandalism, identity theft, fraud, blackmail, obstruction of justice, and so on. There are a lot of nonviolent felonies that land you in the same pool as murderers and rapists.
The rationale is if you make a specific population you don’t like extremely likely to get felonies due to scenarios you place them in you can prevent millions of people from voting. It’s one of many ways the US creates second class citizens and cheap (basically free) labor. Wildfires in California are fought by people in prison, products are made by them too.
The US loves cheap/free (slave) labor and removing the chance to vote and change these unjust laws benefits the oppressors much like preventing enslaved people from learning to read
1 vote on its own doesn’t matter, however, the collective vote of undesirables in a country with the highest incarceration rate on earth could really fuck shit up for the elites who seek to control the population.
It’s the nature of democracy that one vote equals 1/N of the population. That is not flaw with the individual. It just means that for his vote to actually means something, it has to be part of a social memetic arrangements and not cast in the abstract.
Of course with first past the post, the electoral colege, gerrymandering all conspiring to further devalue and skew the value of one vote, democratic voting becomes increasingly meaningless. This is not a flaw of the individual but of the system itself being corrupt.
And then we have yet another layer of disenfranchisement, which is republicanism, in which voters do not directly vote for their interest but vote for an agent which will have a long term in which to “interpret” whatever the electorate really meant by voting for him. He will do so in a space where the constantly fluctuating social memetic arrangements that got him elected are not really under his control and are only loosely, and shortly affected by his action.
This is because the control of the fluctuating social memetic arrangement is in the hand of the actual social elite, the people who own or have seized the megaphone of power and who grossly compete and collude. Largely to maintain the arrangement, usually in an uneasy peace with their immediate competitors. These people are not just politicials but media moguls, celebrities and other billionaires.
Any solution to this problem must look to the system as a whole and create incentives to the individual that will enable him to at least have his 1/N power over the state of things. Free of the influence of the actual social elite who fill his heads with ideas that benefit them rather than the individual. And in a way where individual can act collectively for their interests.
There are two tricky parts that come with allowing prisoners to vote that must be considered. Not hard stops, but just additional dynamics that will be in place.
Prisoners have little to no autonomy, and can therefore be easily coerced into voting a certain way. If the warden/prison staff lean conservative and they hear that a certain prisoner voted liberal, that prisoner is vulnerable to reprisal. There would need to be an additional entity present in prisons to enforce privacy of voting results. But how do we guarantee that this government entity won’t just collude with the other government entity running the prison?
There may be problems in terms of where these votes are counted for. One way to protect the anonymity of prison votes is to pool them among the district that houses the prison. But do we let the prisoners vote for local candidates/laws when they are not locals? In many cases, prisons are located in very small towns and may therefore significantly skew local elections if they participate in them. So does everyone get an absentee ballot for their place of origin instead? Even if the duration of their sentence means they are likely never to go back there? Or do prisoners only get to vote on items/candidates at the federal level?
The prisoners are counted by the census as citizens of the county/municipality in which they are held. Because population determines the number of seats in the House of Representatives I put forth that they should be allowed to vote in the county and municipalities which claim them as citizens. If they are not allowed to vote they should not count towards population for Representation in the House since they are not being represented.
I believe it to be a short-sited thing, but honestly necessary. This is due to the very large range of federal convictions. It goes from having some pot on you, to armed robbery and murder. I don’t agree that those things should necessarily (case by case) include the same voting restrictions, but there is no way the US government is going to take the time to separate the “worse” crimes from the “lesser”. And, as has been mentioned before the goal of the US penal system is (sadly) not rehabilitation. As long as the government has that attitude, it will never change. You lose more than just the right to vote as a felon, btw. The rights most often curtailed include the right to vote and hold public office, employment rights, domestic rights, and financial and contractual rights.
It already separates crimes by sentancing. in the UK if your prison sentence is less than 2 years then you can vote from prison. (Also once your have served your time (including being out on probation/license) you can vote.
You still don’t explain why it’s, in your opinion, necessary to remove voting rights.
You put that it they shouldn’t remove those for small infractions, but that the administration can’t decide on a line where voting restrictions should be put, and therefore just blanket bans every from from voting.
Also it’s somehow ok that after people have finished their punishment, they should be punished some more by stripping them off even more rights.
All of that greatly reduces chances of rehabilitation and keeps criminals in the criminal sector. I fail to see why even minor infractions should lead to lifelong consequences.
It’s necessary because our government is stupid, slow, and can’t make great choices. I should have clarified that it is deemed necessary by the government because they’ll never make the decisions to back it up. I don’t like it, and I never will. I typed that from the flawed perspective of government and should have worded it better.
Add comment