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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated. Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else? As if being incarcerated isn't punishment enough, but disenfranchising on top just seems over the top.

Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another. They are even able to vote without having to return to their registered polling place. Allowing inmates to vote could just as easily be handled the same way.

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> Does serving time really mean you should not get the same say in leaders as everyone else?

It's worse than that. It's the erasure of a check against bad laws. If you pass bad laws that destroy communities by bringing about mass incarceration, the obvious thing to happen next is that you lose the votes of all the people whose lives you've destroyed. Except that you took their votes away too.

For an example of the rot, see Florida: 10% of voting-age citizens have had their vote stolen by the local government. [0] A 2019 referendum to abolish felony disenfranchisement passed with huge margins [1], but then the Republicans passed a new "pay to vote" law, saying it wasn't enough to serve time, but people also had to pay significant fines.

[0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/florida-bans-vo...

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voti...

Yeah, do another referendum and get rid of the pay to vote thing.

Poor people and minorities are who are in prison. Removing voting rights from those groups is a feature, not a flaw, in my opinion.

To be clear, I'm saying it's garbage, but it's garbage very much on purpose.

We’re in agreement here. Just like the bail system. Working as intended if not as designed.

Exactly. It is a form of modern day slavery in many US states.

Just wait until the current regime finishes their plans, which include hacking the exception in Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment [0] to bring back slavery for prisoners.

>> Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The person occupying the Vice President's chair stated clearly [1] "Medicaid cuts in Senate tax bill 'immaterial' compared to ICE increases".

They aren't building all those for-profit prisons for nothing.

Beware.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/01/vanc...

And of course, even if the rich go to prison and lose the ability to actually vote, they have the ability to support/earn favors by donating.

> I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated.

It's literally unconscionable in any kid of democracy to me.

> Many people live in an area, but keep their voting registration in another.

I guess state laws vary a lot, but are you sure that’s legal? You probably are required to have your address updated, even if moving within the same precinct. If they then allow you a choice of locations, sounds fine, but your wording sounded like maybe you don’t tell them you moved, which is probably not legal.

College kids are a prime example. People working remote jobs away from family are another. It is not illegal to own multiple domiciles (as long as your loan papers match primary residence seeing that is being weaponized now), and live back and forth between them.

IANAL but I think domicile is only one place by definition. You can have multiple residences. Your domicile might be required to be the place you spend the most time at. College students would be a common counter-example, if they can live at college for 9+ months and still be registered at their parent’s home or such.

Should someone convicted of voter fraud be allowed to vote?

But I think the laws in some U.S. states do actually allow felons to vote under certain circumstances.

> Should someone convicted of voter fraud be allowed to vote?

Yes. Why shouldn't they?

Absolutely. And in prison it should be easier to verify that they vote just once

This is like requiring a stranger that attempted to break into your house be forcibly allowed on your property later against your wishes (assuming you rationally consider such a person untrustworthy and no mitigating circumstances or other data exists that would make you consider them trustworthy)

It's not like that at all! There's no right to enter a stranger's house in the first place.

I just looked this up earlier, and there are only 2 states that do. Vermont and Maine allow all prisoners to vote. Other states allow some depending on conviction. I was unaware of this. I was aware some states allow felons to vote once released while other states never reinstate that right. That is some heinous shit. No other way to put it

Do you know if anyone has ever sued to either not pay taxes while not allowed to vote, or to be allowed to vote? Ye olde "no taxation without representation"?

That’s not a real legal principle.

Why would they sue to not pay taxes? They make no money that would qualify as taxable, so they would owe no taxes on income not earned. Even people working part time on very low wages can make so little they do not owe. They still have to file though. Never considered if inmates have to file each year or not

there's all sorts of taxes and other impositions/obligationsthat don't require income.

please enlighten me

property taxes, vehicle registration and insurance.

someone serving time is going to be worried about vehicle registration and insurance? just claim it as "off road" with the state since it's obvious you will not be driving it. no need for insurance on a car that's not being driven. property tax might be an issue, but I seriously doubt it's a large percentage of inmates that need to consider it. all in all, nice stretch, but off topic really

There is no legal principle in the US that couples taxation to the right to vote.

Several issues here:

1. Declaration of Independence versus Constitution. Not the same in terms of legal weight.

2. You're implicitly combining "representation" with "voting." The writers of the Declaration of Independence believed (even if we dislike it today) that those are separate. You can tell because all their wives and daughters were still prohibited from voting for generations.

3. If what you're suggesting applied, then wouldn't that mean everybody who hasn't registered to vote, or noncitizens and those under 18--are all exempt from sales tax and income tax?

> I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated.

The bulk of felony-disenfranchisement laws have a clear causal connection to preventing newly-freed slaves from voting, as they were enacted alongside terrible laws ("Black codes") which did a lot of blatantly-evil stuff to force former slaves either into a shadow of their old servitude or into jail.

The problem is some people imaging voting is a prize you get for making the government happy, which can be clawed-back.

Instead, votes in a democracy are something we are owed due to the control that government exercises over our lives. If the government exerts extra control to lock you in a cage, that increases the moral necessity of a vote, rather than decreasing it.

if somebody defects against society very seriously, damaging others, i have no problem with stripping them of legal rights. this is in fact exactly the principle underlying imprisonment. constitutional rights are granted by men, not god, in service of shared prosperity; democracy is good insofar as it produces good results, not because it is the intrinsic source of good. there is no higher construct to appeal to, like this platonic ideal of democracy you're gesturing at

Okay so now you’ve set an arbitrary limit with “very seriously” yet you do not define what that means. Is grand theft auto worthy of striping someone’s vote? Is conviction of marijuana possession? Is shop lifting? Is embezzlement? Where’s the line of very serious for you? It won’t be the same for someone else. Do you see the issue inherent with your proposal?

it is arbitrary yes, but the point of democracy is to allow society to codify these subjective questions into rigid laws. I mean, what is the arbitrary line between tough love and child abuse? We have to decide somewhere, and we use democracy to draw that line.

Unfortunately you're also engaging in an appeal to universal virtue.

It's weird because your argument doesn't seem to disagree with the notion that people should stay enfranchised, other than you saying specifically people should be disenfranchised for breaking a law. But you're now discussing lines so I guess you mean, literally any crime means no more voting.

A good democracy, and by that I mean useful for humans, isn't good by trying to be perfectly virtuous, it's good because it has recursive mechanisms to maintain its usefulness to humans. The primary mechanism is voting. For that reason I personally believe nothing should be allowed to remove the ability to use that primary mechanism, since the obvious outcome is a fascist is elected, and begins seeking means to strip the right to vote from his opponents, ensuring his perpetual rule. Modern example: I have a little antifa flag on my backpack, and therefore am now considered a terrorist in the USA, and can be arrested and have my right to vote stripped (other democratic mechanisms might prevent this, for now).

What crime would I have committed? Declaring an ideology a terrorist group is nonsensical but possible. Me suddenly being a terrorist crossed that line for you though.

So does speeding. So does operating your motor vehicle without checking your brake lights and turning indicators, every time. So does riding on a horse backwards in a specific town in Texas (don't forget local jurisdictions have their own laws, often insane!)

> What crime would I have committed?

This is a personal decision, but would you say the same about someone with a small Nazi swastika on their backpack?

That might be relevant if antifa ever rounded up and slaughtered eleven million people.

It's relevant if you think logic is worth something.

Well, first, I reject both sidesism because Nazism is an ideology that wants me and my friends to die, and denies our very humanity, and my ideology doesn't really want anyone to die, and absolutely does not deny anyone's humanity.

However, under liberal democracy I personally don't believe the wearing of a swastika should be a crime, though I don't mind if people wearing swastikas are rejected from every interaction they attempt to have, denied business everywhere. The simple banning of nazis memorabilia doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop the rise of nazism in Germany so it seems pointless overall. The Germans had their opportunity to actually apply this anti-nazi law when banning the AFD came up, and they failed to act, so it seems the only thing the law is good for is preventing people from playing Wolfenstein.

Under other forms of society I think the wearing of a swastika should result in the ejection of someone from society entirely.

You're the perfect person to have illustrated this. Someone could've committed no crime, as you're claiming for yourself with your symbol, and you'd still want them ejected because of a symbol.

You are in principle no different to the people you're complaining about. You've just got a smaller set of symbols than they do that you don't like.

I'm not a liberal, I don't worship law as a basis for ethics. Hence why I specified how I think things should work under liberal democracy (not arrested for the symbol) vs how I think things should work under other systems. Under other systems the word "crime" isn't really meaningful, more of concern is what is considered disruptive, violent, antisocial, or harmful to other people, which describes perfectly the wearing of nazi symbology as well as the ideology itself.

Nazis should be ejected from society. Liberal democracy shouldn't have laws that allow arresting people for speech. Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts, that's just an anarchist explaining to you their ideology as well as how they apply their values under the current system.

Tell me, straight faced, that displaying a pair of antifa flags is as bad as displaying a swastika.

Let's consider the consequences of that line with respect to electoral math. If we consider only serious criminals, e.g. murderers, they constitute a negligible proportion of the population and with high probability the number of election outcomes changed by allowing them to vote or not would be none.

By contrast, if you lump in people convicted of things like drug possession, that is enough people to change the outcome of some elections. And in general it's a strong heuristic that if huge numbers of people are committing a particular crime, it's a result of flaws in the law or society rather than flaws in huge numbers of different people.

So the only time disenfranchising felons matters to the outcome is when you get the line wrong, implying that it shouldn't be done because it shouldn't affect the outcome unless it's being done improperly.

The big issue are perverse incentives here. If felony sentence means no vote, the best thing you can do is to criminalize demographics you dont like as much as possible.

That way you can have pleasure of mistreating them and also prevent them from voting.

I can understand stripping them of the right temporarily while in prison. That's the time in which they pay their debt to society for the harm they're convicted of. Some rights are restricted during that period.

But once it's determined that the debt has been repaid and they're free to live outside and participate in society again, it seems hard to justify them not also participating in the democratic process.

> debt has been repaid

I know people say this, but I think this framing likely generates anti-prison arguments because it basically doesn’t make any sense. How does being in a cage for X years repay society? It doesn’t. It does keep the harmful person away from society though, which is a very different and useful thing (in many cases, obviously imprisonment for some crimes is dumb).

Being in prison is the punishment. It is not restitution, but as part of the punishment restitution could be imposed. It's hard to pay that restitution while incarcerated though. Some people advocate that just because one has been released from incarceration that they should still not be allowed to vote until any moneys owed have been paid. That could be fines from the court as well as restitution to victims.

> [in prison they] pay their debt to society

How exactly is taking away an inmates vote "paying me back" for a crime in my community? "Society" isn't actually benefiting here.

Let's go down the list of justifications:

1. Is disenfranchisement rehabilitative justice? No, if anything it's the opposite, preparing them to fail when they get out, promoting ignorance and helplessness instead of engagement in the political process.

2. Is disenfranchisement punitive justice? Not usefully, because the worst criminals won't care anyway, instead it tends to hurt the people who deserve it the least, the people who would otherwise try to work through "the system."

3. Is disenfranchisement a deterrent? No, LOL. Nobody goes: "OK, I was going to commit the crime and risk being caught and shot or jailed for many years, buuuuut then I realized I wouldn't be able to vote, so I'm out."

What's left? Bad reasons, like helping politicians get away with abusive policies.

> this is in fact exactly the principle underlying imprisonment.

No, the principle underlying imprisonment is to protect others and rehabilitate the criminal.

> I've never understood the not allowing felons to vote, even while incarcerated.

It's the racism. It's why the 13th amendment allows slavery for criminals and why Black people are disproportionately targeted and imprisoned.

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