A resounding majority of Americans don’t support giving prisoners the right to vote in national elections, a poll found.
In the HarrisX survey for The Hill released Thursday, 69% of registered voters said incarcerated felons shouldn’t be allowed to retain their voting rights; 31% favored the idea.
The chief champion of voting access for prisoners has been Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a front-runner in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but that position has come under fire from Republicans and a few Democrats, including another White House contender, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
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2 comments:
Maybe not while they are incarcerated but surely when they have finished their sentence their rights should be restored. And except for violent felons and possibly mental patients, 2nd amendment rights should also be restored after a felon's sentence has been completed.
I think most people when they hear the word 'felon', think of murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals. But felonies cover a large swath of criminal acts, many of which do not fall under violence or personal harm.
Having the wrong fish in your possession, for example, would get you a felony conviction. Getting a dishonorable discharge from the military would also bar you from owning a firearm. Joyriding in a car could also get you a felony and bar ownership of firearms. And many other circumstances could get one a felony conviction.
It is my belief that someone who commits a mistake when young should not be given a 'life sentence' of having their rights permanently taken away. They commit a crime, serve their punishment, make restitution, and whatever else is deemed appropriate for the crime they committed and that should be the end of it.
They are labeled a felon for the rest of their life and that in itself will be a burden for the remainder of their life. What reasonable purpose would be served by taking rights away permanently? Even if they do not use a firearm while committing a felony, or get a discharge other than honorable, they would still forfeit that right forever.
Now they cannot legally protect themselves or their family if the need ever arises. They are effectively serving a life sentence even though they may have only served a year in jail.
To me, laws such as these are a 'backdoor' method to disarm people. Gun control laws, for the most part, affect only the law-abiding citizens. True criminals do not concern themselves with any restrictions that may be in place. And otherwise, law-abiding people are made into criminals by wanting to protect themselves and their families with a firearm when it is illegal for them to do so.
And let's face it, crime levels in any area prescribe one needs to have a firearm to effectively defend themselves from those who wish to do harm.
Gun control laws are a knee jerk, feel-good non-solution the pols use to show voters they are doing something and are 'tough on crime.'
It is my belief that the powers-that-be do not want an armed citizenry and use tactics such as these to further disarm people and reduce the threat to THEM so they can impose their will with less resistance and opposition.
To the average person, they may seem stupid, ineffective, but they know exactly what they are doing. They don't acquire and retain power because they are unintelligent, quite the contrary. But they do ACT dumb to create an illusion they are less of a threat to freedoms than they actually are.
Socialists don't care what Americans want.
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