A Couple of Other Points on Felon Voting

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Roger Clegg:

Hans von Spakovsky and I have a column today on Governor Terry McAuliffe’s lamentable decision last Friday to reenfranchise over 200,000 felons in Virginia.  But the news coverage of that decision calls me to make a couple of additional points.

Over eleven years ago, I had a column on National Review Online debunking the claim that racism explains why felons are currently disenfranchised.  I was prompted to write it because a number of bien-pensants were making this claim at that time, which I suspected could be traced to misinformation being fed to them by the “the well-funded and ubiquitous felon-reenfranchisement movement.”

It’s still happening.

The New York Times has an editorial today that states, “Felon disenfranchisement laws … were enacted during the Reconstruction era in a racist effort to make it harder for newly freed African-Americans to vote.”  And, in an editorial titled, “Felon voting bans have a racist past,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune refers to the “the racist rationale that has underpinned state laws disenfranchising felons after their release from prison.”

Those interested in the truth can read my old column linked to above, as well as a paper that Hans von Spakvosky and I did more recently and my testimony before Congress.  The bottom line is that, while over a hundred years ago five Southern states did target newly-freed slaves with their disenfranchisement laws, those particular laws are no longer on the books and could be easily challenged and struck down if they were, and the practice of disenfranchising felons has roots that predate those laws and has been followed in the other states for good reasons that have nothing to do with race.

Not that the truth matters to some people.

While I’m at it, let me address another common — and wrong — argument for letting felons vote.  That’s the argument that, as soon as you’ve served your prison sentence, you should be able to vote because you’ve “paid your debt to society.”

My hat is grudgingly off to the person — no doubt a felon or a liberal or both — who came up with that phrase.  It sounds plausible but, when you think about it, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

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The dead and Felons are ready for Hillary

@kitt: They have a lot in common.

I just think unless you strip a person of citizenship they should have the right to vote. There are more bad people outside of prison than those that we locked up.