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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if, as I progress through my 30s, I am becoming more liberal, more cynical or more jaded, or what, but it seems like every day I read some article about the United States which elicits a, "What the FUCK?" from me.

This is one of those articles. Seriously? Prison??

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Why do you associate this with becoming more liberal? Seems the reverse should be true.

One of many reasons the single-axis scale is misleading. :)

It does somewhat fit the traditional fault lines over school districting, though. Traditionally, conservatives quite strongly opposed to allowing school attendance to cross boundaries, supporting separate districts in which each district was funded exclusively by local taxpayers and attended exclusively by children resident in that distrct. Mix of reasons, ranging from (on the nicer side) federalism/decentralization to (on the less-nice side) maintaining de-facto segregated schools.

In addition, liberals have tended to be the main ones behind aggregation-with-choice programs, in which many smaller districts in a metropolitan area would be aggregated into one organizational district, where parents could choose to send their kids to any school in the district. Conservative suburbanites have tended to prefer keeping their schools separate, without cross-boundary enrollment permitted.

The article neglected to provide any rationale whatsoever for the "other side" which may be the triggering the WTFs. I'm not saying the logic is good, but here it is: A proportion of the school's budget comes from property tax. I found a pdf that says it is about 20% of the budget in California [1]. Thus:

Expensive neighborhood -> lots of property tax -> rich school

So essentially the laws punish freeloaders of education. Out of all the things a person can "freeload" education is probably the most noble, which I guess is why the law seems so dicey.

[1] http://www.edsource.org/pub_QA_BudgetProcess06.html

I don't really care about the other side. Why are we putting people in prison over this? Having the law/rule is one thing, I guess, but the punishment is extremely excessive. 10 days in prison, and 3 years of probation? She's lucky she got commuted by the governor. Not everyone will be so.

Lifeboat ethics demand awful solutions like this. If the best school in the region is known to let this slide, it will be besieged by a population it won't have the resources to support. It's almost like tax evasion, only you're required to move before you'll be allowed to pay the tax, and that particular school is not in a position to fix that. The list of applicable laws must have been pretty short if they had to resort to "grand theft", and at that point the penalty was driven by the amount of money at issue, from a law mostly aimed at car thieves.

Don't forget that as a felony (before the Govenor intervene), she could no longer vote and loses many other rights. Basically not a citizen anymore.

The woman in question lives in Ohio. In Ohio, a felony conviction means you can't vote while in prison (in this case for 10 days); once released, even on parole, you can vote. See http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=2... for the nice table.

In fact, a felony conviction only carries permanent loss of voting rights in only 12 states out of 50 according to that table.

Now I agree that there lots of other impacts of a felony conviction; the article mentions it being a bar to being a teacher in some cases, for example, and reading the relevant Ohio law she would be unable to hold public office in Ohio or to sit on a jury. And clearly if the woman were to move to one of those 12 states she would not be able to register to vote there.... But it's not as cut-and-dried as "could no longer vote".

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