"Give felons and prisoners the right to vote"

The title of this post is the title of this new commentary in the Washington Post authored by Gideon Yaffe. Here is how it starts and ends:

This week, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vowed to sign individual orders restoring the voting rights of more than 200,000 convicted felons living in the state. His pledge followed the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling that the mass clemency McAuliffe issued in April overstepped his power under the commonwealth’s constitution.  Republicans complained bitterly — think of all those Democratic votes from the many African Americans who stand to benefit! — and promised to scrutinize every order for errors.

But the GOP has it wrong.  Not only is McAuliffe doing the right thing, but also he should push further.  Prisoners, too, should be allowed to vote, no matter their crimes. While only Vermont and Maine currently grant prisoners the vote, felon disenfranchisement fundamentally undermines the democratic rationale of our criminal laws.  We cannot hold citizens to account for violating our laws while denying them a say over those laws.

In a democracy, it can fairly be said that when the state does something unpleasant to you — locks you up, forces you to pay taxes, takes your property — that injury is self-inflicted.  Since it’s your government, whatever it does to you is something you do to yourself.  And it’s your government because you have a say over what it does: You have the vote. But when the state brings down the hammer on a disenfranchised, recidivist felon, the punishment he receives is not self-inflicted.  His punishment might as well be levied by a foreign government.

Most felons — whether in prison, on probation or parole, or entirely free of state supervision — are citizens.  They should not be treated like foreigners.  First of all, they have no other geographic home: They cannot be deported, because citizens have a right to be here.  But felons also have no other political home.  Nowhere else can they live under a government whose actions are their actions. In this way, they are importantly different from immigrants, who (if they come from a place governed by the rule of law) are granted a say over the behavior of some government somewhere....

In a democracy, felon enfranchisement should not be a partisan issue.  Both Republicans and Democrats ought to be held to account for their crimes by a government whose actions they can own. We should give the vote to citizens, in or out of prison, whom we wish to hold responsible for violating laws that are not just ours but also theirs.