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.