One can believe that conservatives should engage with and try to help ex-convicts without believing all ex-convicts should automatically receive voting privileges as soon as their sentences and probation are completed. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is introducing a bill to force all states to do the latter, but it’s a profoundly bad idea.
Actually, the felon-voting provision of Pelosi’s coming bill is far from its only objectionable idea (automatic registration and expanded early voting would be awful policies), but let’s concentrate on this one for now. Automatic, universal felon re-enfranchisement is a bad idea because it makes no distinction between the levels of seriousness of various crimes, because it asks nothing of an entirely free ex-convict before his privileges are restored, and because it tramples on the authority of individual states to decide how to run their criminal justice systems and their voting standards.
Numerous states that have expanded or eased ex-convict voting requirements have still insisted that those guilty of particularly heinous crimes should not enjoy easy re-access to the ballot. This makes sense. Some crimes, such as ones involving brutal violence or child abuse, strike most people as so inexcusable as to require more than just a prison term before full citizenship is restored. Where to draw that line, or set that boundary, is a prudential judgment for local or state communities to make, but Pelosi’s coming bill apparently would force the allowance of an ex-murderer voting, against all such prudence or common sense.
Meanwhile, for lesser offenders, even if one believes that it makes sense to remove excessive bureaucratic hurdles for them to vote again, it is hardly unreasonable to ask them to prove their good citizenship again before letting them do so. If a community wants to include in its punishment for breaking the law the removal of voting privileges even after incarceration and probation, the sense of the local majority should prevail.
The logic is this: The convict may have served his term behind bars and may have stayed out of trouble while in post-incarceration probation, but that doesn’t prove he will remain on the “straight and narrow” once no agents of the state are directly overseeing him. It might make sense to impose a test period of two years, or at least one, before affording them ballot access. As in: OK, only once you have been a fully free man, rather than a ward of the state, for a certain time, have you proven you can be entrusted with this sacred privilege.
Again, Pelosi’s proposal leaves no leeway for such logic.
Finally, Pelosi’s bill would trample on principles of federalism (states’ authority) by forcing a one-size-fits-all regime on 50 semi-sovereign states. It is the states, not the federal government, which bear primary responsibility for criminal justice. It is the states, not the Washington behemoth, which are tasked with deciding their own basic criteria for voting qualifications (as long as there is no invidious discrimination), and the states which are afforded primary responsibility for determining the “times, places and manner of holding elections.”
There is good reason for this. States serve as “laboratories of democracy.” Different states try different policies, and each state can see from the others what worked well, and also what unforeseen drawbacks bedeviled each policy. Plus, as we all know, community standards and values are quite different in, say, New York and Oklahoma. Why should one size fit all?
Pelosi’s bill is terribly misguided. Its progress should be arrested, and it merits no pardon or parole.
