[hesk]

> If felons were truly forgiven, they would have their right to vote restored.

This is a very US-centric attitude and very undemocratic in my view.

In Germany, for example, people in jail are generally allowed to vote. They could even set up a voting booth inside the jail if there were demand. However, there usually isn't and inmates vote by mail.

In the last 25 years, only 80 people, who were found guilty of treason, have lost the right to vote.

However, people whose sentence is at least a year in jail are excluded from running for office for 5 years.

> Society has never perceived jail time as truly resetting the scarlet letter back to zero.

Some jobs here require a so-called "certificate of conduct" which you can get from the police and which lists criminal convictions. The entries in this certificate expire after a certain number of years, depending on the the crime. The maximum time a conviction can be in the record is 10 years after it has been served. Afterwards, it's deleted. (It is not deleted from police records but from what a company could find out in a background check by going through official channels.)

[thaumasiotes]

80 people have been convicted of treason in Germany since 1993? More than 3 a year? That seems... shockingly high.

What were they doing? How many independent acts of treason was this?

[hesk]

I quoted the original number from a newspaper article which didn't go into details. But I was curious myself, so I contacted the author of the article and did some of my own research.

The German federal statistics office publishes a report every year which lists how many people have lost their right to vote or to hold public office according to §45 (2) and (5) StGB (German criminal law) [1]. Unfortunately, the reports do not distinguish between these two cases. In any case, the numbers are vanishingly small in recent years. I looked at the last 12 years for which there is a report (2005 - 2016) and it's only 15 cases, so a little more than 1 per year. Again, it doesn't distinguish between losing the right to vote and losing the right to hold office.

The people who lost their rights according to this law were mostly convicted for crimes against the state, the public order, or misconduct in office. To make it more precise, the report lists crimes such as joining a terrorist organisation, obstruction of punishment, forcing a subordinate to commit a crime, criminal assault while in office, corruption, etc. The original newspaper article summarized them as crimes against the state which I translated as treason.

However, it seems that the law was applied more often in the past. I found a secondary source [2] which lists 178 cases between 1978 and 2008. The primary source [3] is a dissertation which costs 80 €.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/GPStatistik/receive/DESerie_serie_00..., § 5.1

[2] Sonja Bühler, Die Aberkennung des aktiven Wahlrechts von Strafgefangenen nach § 45 Abs. 5 StGB, Freilaw 1/2017, http://www.freilaw.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/0...

[3] Jan Oelbermann, Wahlrecht und Strafe, Universität Bremen, 2011, http://www.nomos-shop.de/Oelbermann-Wahlrecht-Strafe/product...