Inmates can vote!!!

If you had asked me just one month ago if inmates could vote, I would likely have been able to articulate a HECK NO through my riotous laughter.  Boy would the joke have been on me.  Any logic at all would dictate that someone whom has made an error in judgment significant enough to have their right to liberty removed would likewise not be allowed to effect something as significant as an election.  As I have come to understand, logic seldom plays a part in the affairs of our government.


For reasons beyond my own feeble understanding, only those inmates convicted of a felony are barred from the voting booth and even then, only in 48 of our 50 states.  You read that last sentence correctly, both Vermont and Maine allow convicted felons to vote.  Do not think that I denigrate these two states too harshly, I have a special fondness for both.  I feel that to be fair to these two, I should also point out that the majority of the remaining states only deprive certain felons of the vote.  Should you commit a crime that is not deemed heinous enough, you can still vote.  Thank God that each state has a legislative branch that is willing to take the time to designate which felonies are despicable enough to warrant the removal of the right to vote.  Where do these guys find the time to vote on this junk?  I used to harbor the illusion that serving in public office was an important and time-consuming job.  That bubble has been good and surely burst.

For illustration purposes, lets suppose that a republican were to move to Vermont (an easily identifiable bastion of liberals) and kill 10 democrats.  This felon would have the right to vote and their vote would count 10 times more than it did before.  I don't believe the death penalty applies there, so for the rest of their life their vote will count multiple times, not limited to 10 given that the persons they killed would likely have had offspring and raised them with an inherent bent to their own views.

The above example is extreme in the utmost, but so is the example given in the 2006 article Why Can't Felons Vote? by Reynolds Holding.  He uses the case of a woman that "floated" (post-dated) several checks and then lost her job.  "By the time she got a new job several years later, the checks had bounced."  This crime is a felony and as such she was prevented from voting as a result of her sentencing.  Mr. Holding is upset that she cannot vote.  And I would be 100% for allowing her to vote... had she NOT COMMITTED A FELONY! 

I could rant for an hour about personal responsibility, but I have learned that either you understand the concept already, or you just don't care.

This whole issue is only now on my radar due to the ruling by a federal appeals court on Tue. 01/05/10 that concluded that Washington state's justice system is "infected" with racial discrimination and therefore the ban violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  I am in perfect agreement with Secretary of State Sam Reed in his statement that "If they need to deal with the law and justice system, deal with that,".  Allowing felons to vote is not a cure for a corrupt judicial system.

Granted, the elections have long since been affected by criminals that number too many to count (organized crime), including but in no way limited to the actual elected officials themselves.  But I would like to think that those persons who have been convicted of being a menace to society should not be included in setting its direction.