Then, whenever someone sentenced to death was later found to be innocent (or pardoned), a random name on the list of "Yes" voters would be picked to be killed in place of the innocent convict.
Wouldn't it make more sense as a thought experiment if only "Yes" voters could be executed only if and when convicted of a crime deserving of capital punishment?
The point of the thought experiment is that innocent people are being murdered by the state from time to time for crimes they did not personally commit.
The purpose is essentially "if you are willing to put enough trust in the state to get it right every single time in capital cases, then shouldn't it follow that you be willing to put your own life on the line in the even that the state turns out to be wrong?"
They don't believe it would ever happen to them. Support for the death penalty is support for the state to have the power to end your own life, too.
Don't you think it's an interesting quirk for a legal system to allow both execution and posthumous pardons? If the point of a pardon is to end someone's punishment (even someone "completely guilty"), then shouldn't that necessitate that all punishments imposed by the justice system be impermanent, at least in principle?
So rather than being thought-provoking, it's almost thought-terminating.
And I haven't touched on whether we should execute people in my post. So engaging on that front is also going to be a short road for us. Because in another post, I can get to "the death penalty" is wrong in a much more direct fashion. It's a game you're not allowed to make mistakes in. The minute you've executed an innocent person, you've failed.
It sounds like you're saying that you don't think that guilty people should ever be pardoned (even if those pardons didn't lead to the possibility of you having to be executed). That's probably not what you're saying, but I'm trying to understand the significance you are putting on the distinction between "innocent" and "pardoned".
If there are times in which a guilty person should be pardoned and not have to serve a life sentence, then surely there should be times when a guilty person is pardoned and spared from serving a death sentence. Morally speaking I think it is irrelevant if the pardon comes before conviction (i.e. when they are still legally presumed innocent), or before sentencing, or before execution, or after execution.
If you definitely wouldn't want to be executed for a guilty person, and you do believe in pardons (as they exist in the US legal system), then I think you shouldn't want to be executed for an innocent person either.
I believe that previous sentence is logically consistent with your position though. You are saying that P does-not-imply Q and NOT P does-not-imply Q, and I'm saying Q implies P.