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by click170 4032 days ago
Voting is the corner stone of democracy. How is it fair to stop someone from voting for a mistake they made that isn't necessarily violent or even have a victim? A mistake they may have made early on in their lives, the lessons of which they have learned.

And that's ignoring the disproportionately higher incarceration rate of black men in america.
1 comments
jacobolus 4032 days ago
It’s not supposed to be fair, or a crime deterrent, or even a punishment, really. The clear reason for disenfranchising felons is to tilt elections in the favor of the Republican party in a way that has some political cover. It’s part of a range of efforts both official and unofficial to suppress the vote among young people, poor people, and minority groups, including voter ID laws, restrictions on voting by mail, improperly purging people from registered voter rolls, intentional underfunding/understaffing of polling places so people will give up in the face of long lines, discouraging/threatening/misleading junk mail, etc., not to mention all the absurd redistricting schemes.

All the tiny efforts taken to suppress voting end up making quite a dramatic difference in close elections.

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15155 4032 days ago
How do you feel about paid firearm registration? Required, firearm-specific taxes?
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ams6110 4032 days ago
You got today's memo from the Clinton campaign?
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jacobolus 4032 days ago
Hm? This has been going on for decades, and isn’t about Clinton per se (personally I detest the Clintons), but affects every type of election from local races on up.

For Republican politicians and operatives, it’s smart political strategy (at least in a short-term zero-sum kind of way, assuming the only goal is to win the next election rather than to govern effectively or build a stable society). Likewise, it’s smart political strategy for Democratic party politicians and operatives to make voter registration and voting easy and convenient, because on the margins the additional votes tend to go to Democrats.

On the bright side, voting rights for ex-felons have actually been improving somewhat over the last 20 years, even if that improvement is patchy and has regressed in some places. Unfortunately, many other types of voter suppression have gotten worse.

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