Truck and Barter

You seem to miss the first key issue regarding ex-felons being or not being able to vote. The important question is not how many likely voters "we" are really losing (I'm not sure who the "we" is you refer to, since voting is an individual act). Rather, the more fundamental and important issue strikes at the heart of the essential rights and responsibilities that come with being a citizen of the United States, a supposedly democratic nation.

You miss the point by asking about only the practical outcomes of allowing ex-felons to vote. The real question should be a much more fundamental one.

Secondly, unless you believe there's something inherent to being black or African-American that makes someone more likely to commit a felony (racism, if you will), then you should question why the percentage of black men with felony convictions is much larger than their share of the general population.

To me, it seems, that the system is at least slightly corrupt. If the system that decides who the felons are is corrupt, then we probably shouldn't base who can vote and who cannot (a fundamental liberty in a democratic nation) on the products of that system.

Hello?

Gee, I can't believe he's not in a hurry to respond to these inane comments. Voting is a privilege, not a right, and felons - like minors, lunatics, and foreigners - should be denied this privilege. After all, if they were so anxious to exercise their civic rights and responsibilities, they would not be felons in the first place!

"you should question why the percentage of black men with felony convictions is much larger than their share of the general population."

They commit crimes in numbers much larger than their share of the general population, ergo they are convicted in numbers much larger than their share of the general population. Is it "racism" that women and Asians are underrepresented? That young men of every race are overrepresented?

The system works. Get over it.

Voting is a privilege and not a right? I think many Constitutional scholars would disagree with that statement. Are they "inane" too? Is James Madison inane? How about Lincoln?

To quote the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution, "The RIGHT of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

(Feel free to review Amedments XII, XIV, XIX)

If the US criminal justice system disproportionately affects African-Americans ("the percentage of black men with felony convictions is much larger than their share of the general population") AND there's nothing inherent to being Arican-American that makes someone more likely to be convicted of a felony, then (logically) there something wrong with the system that's convicting so many more African-Americans of felonies.

I was just offering a comment to a publicly posted blog. I think it's a pretty common response to the basic premise of the original post. Publicly posting something implies a willingness to discuss, defend, and/or develop the arguments and ideas in that post. And the comments to this particular post weren't exactly overwhelming in numbers. Just trying to start a discussion.

If you're interested in practical outcomes (and yes, the system fails again):

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004781.php
VOTER FRAUD IN FLORIDA, PART CXXVI....Publius at Legal Fiction decided today to revisit a story he's written about before, and in the process uncovered some damn good reporting from Chris Davis and Matthew Doig of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Short version: Felons are not allowed to vote in Florida, and last July, after a protracted battle by the state, a federal judge forced Florida election officials to make their newly created felon list public. Surprise! It turned out the list had lots of blacks (who mostly vote Democratic) but virtually no Hispanics (who mostly vote Republican). After a public outcry, the list was scrapped.

Fine. But why were there no Hispanics on the list? Was it just an unforeseen computer glitch or was it deliberate hanky panky? Publius has the full story, and the bottom line is that the evidence seems to indicate that it probably wasn't just a glitch. Go read it.

I'll add one comment of my own. The technical reason that Hispanics were excluded from the list is that Florida officials insisted that no one be purged from voting rolls unless their voter registration record matched perfectly with a prison record. This is a good idea, but it turns out that Hispanics are listed as "white" in the prison database and as "Hispanic" in the voter registration database. Thus, none of them matched perfectly.

Davis and Doig present several pieces of evidence that suggest everyone knew perfectly well this would happen, and all of it makes sense to me. I've been involved in database projects like this before, and they all the work the same way, especially when they're done by a big consulting company like Accenture. The database schemas are all carefully compared with each other, test runs are performed, data conversions are done, and sample data is run and matched against hand-checked data to make sure all the code is working properly. This and more is done multiple times by multiple people (and billed out at $200 per hour). That's just how it works, and an obvious data mismatch like this would leap out almost immediately and set off all sorts of alarms.

In other words, of course they knew. In a project of this size, it's just inconceivable that they didn't. And if CNN and several local newspapers hadn't sued to open up the database, no one would ever have been the wiser.

Disgusting. But hardly unexpected, is it?

I have no real view on the voter rolls purging in Florida. If it can be shown that people used the list specifically because it only listed blacks, then it's terrible. If it's the case that they simply used the felon rolls, then it strikes me as a case of lazy investigation, which isn't new or particularly condemning. Democrats regularly ignore legal citizenship status when they use their methods of voter enrollment. Which is worse: enforcing a limitation on a right in a haphazard manner, or attempting to ignore the regulations in order to stack rolls? It's not an easy game to call. (Let's all remember the shenanigans from BOTH sides of the aisle in Florida 2000.)

But this largely misses my point. The rule about felons not voting can't rest "disproportionately" on anyone if it simply follows the distribution of felons. The distribution of short arms across a group can't fall disproportionately on shorter people if a population has mostly short people.

The thrust of the article from the NYT is that the rule about voters is, and I'm reading tone here I'll admit, terrible because of the way it "singles out" a specific group of voters -- blacks. This simply isn't the case. It's an effect of whatever (possibly distorted) reasons that produce a felon population with a higher number of blacks relative to the general population.

Arguing that the rule against felons having the right to vote is bad because it tends to eliminate felons from the rolls of potential voters is an odd line of argument.

JS is correct on two very fundamental points: 1) voting is a right. 2) Posting, with an open comments thread, is an implication that I would be willing to discuss the issue.

Two caveats to these, respectively: 1) Rights have, since the inception of this country, been subject to modification and review and are not always seen as "absolute". Witness, for example, the restriction on freedom of speech that we have in libel/slander laws, and the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" exception that creates a potentially hazardous situation for others. Also, there are areas such as schools and public institutions where rights are restricted based on belief in an overwhelming need for a governing body to exert stricter control (among other reasons). 2) I reply when I have time. I really, truly enjoy the privelege of being able to post to this blog, and do wish to engage in regular conversaton about a number of topics. It is not, however, incumbent upon me to always respond in the comments section when I am unable due to personal constraints. Also, a willingness to engage in conversation is not the same as a requirement to do so. Responding is a choice, not a demand. I enjoy the discussion when I do respond, but feel under no obligation to always do so.

The natural question arises, of course, as to validity of denying felons the right to vote. My first impression is this is small beer in terms of deterrence. I imagine very few potential felons stop to think "...but if I do this, I may not be able to ever vote again." The other side of the issue, of course, is the choice of a community to eliminate the possibility that felons may affect the outcome of an election. The assumption, of course, is that their voting preferences are somehow potentially damaging to the rest of the society. This seems like a stretch, and a hard one to base the passage of the law on. This makes me think that a lot of the argument to deny felons the vote is based on the whole "how can we let this murderer or rapist help choose our public representatives?" Also, there's the issue about the nature of "felony", since we include more crimes in that category now than in the past (I think -- that needs some support that I just don't have time to look up; I'll be the first to concede the point if I'm wrong).

As I mentioned in the post, the pro/con argument is not something I'm versed in. What I do feel able to comment on is the blatant fallacy of the argument presented in the article. A fallacy that arises because of the author's either inability to think logically about what "disproportionate" really means, or their purposeful attempt to mislead.

JS keeps claiming that there is "something" wrong about a justice system that convicts disproportionately more african-americans than non-african-americans. And yet, all of the statistical data supports the conclusion that african-americans in general commit crimes at a higher rate than non-african-americans. JS wants to insinuate that this isn't true. And from that insinuate that the denial of felons' voting rights is unfair.

Given the failure of one of JS' premises, his "logic" ... simply isn't.