NYT: Voting Rights, Human Rights

[AtLiberty]

Voting Rights, Human Rights

October 14, 2005
NYT Editorial

The United States has the worst record in the democratic world when it comes to stripping convicted felons of the right to vote. Of the nearly five million people who were barred from participating in the last presidential election, for example, most, if not all, would have been free to vote if they had been citizens of any one of dozens of other nations. Many of those nations cherish the franchise so deeply that they let inmates vote from their prison cells.

Courts outside this country are actually expanding the rights of prison inmates to cast ballots, on the theory that the right to vote is a basic human right that should be abridged only after careful deliberation and under the rarest circumstances. That message was underscored last week in a strong ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which has jurisdiction in the nations that are parties to the European Convention, a rights charter drafted more than a half-century ago...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/opinion/14fri4.html

[GuvWurld]

1. This is an important frame

Rights and values are key aspects of the message the movement must be emphasizing. Read or listen to anything Paul Lehto has to say and it will fit into context.

[Land Shark]

2. It may be that the non-disenfranchising countries value the franchise

enough to preserve it in felons because they value FREEDOM so much (it's a simple matter to jail 2% of the population to gain a 2% edge in elections, if the jailed are political opponents). Even if those who are jailed are not political opponents per se, there's a general deterrent to jailing too large a percentage of the population......

So, not denying a felon's right to vote, it tends to show that the society is just (by not denying unrelated rights) and that it is the felon (if anybody) who is the tyrant, not the government....

I prefer "denying the right to vote" as the way to describe it because the right to vote still exists, it is simply being denied with the support of law. Under the Declaration of Independence's revolutionary formulations (admittedly not able to be applied for a long long time) certain basic rights are unalienable, that we now call "inalienable" rights. If anything is inalienable, it would have to be the primary right of them of all, the right from which all other rights depend and flow: the vote.