When There Just Aren’t Enough Dead People Voting For You…
By Mitch Berg
…then the Democrats can be assured to start trolling the prisons.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting, finding the state’s criminal-justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination.
In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all convicts is wrong.
Who could possibly make such a ruling? (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):
The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.
The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.
So – being convicted by a jury of one’s peers (or pleading out of one’s own volition) is the same as poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on the law-abiding?
The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.
In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.
Patterico, from a larger analysis that you should read in its entirety:
To me, the biggest concern flowing from this decision is the precedent that federal courts can now make sweeping declarations about the discriminatory nature of the criminal justice system based on dubious studies by sociology professors. (More about that in the extended entry below.) The implications are potentially staggering and go far beyond felons’ right to vote. If federal courts can declare the entire system of criminal justice in a state (or the country!) to be racially discriminatory, you could see an invalidation of Three Strikes laws or any other recidivism statute. You could see a sweeping invalidation of laws prohibiting felons the right to possess firearms. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.
Commenter carlitos points out another potentially disturbing impact of the decision: its potential effect on rural districts with big prisons. Given that the decision explicitly extends to currently incarcerated inmates, you’re potentially looking not just at a huge bump in the number of Democratic voters as a whole, but also very concentrated bumps in districts that otherwise would likely be reliably Republican.
On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?
I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence. Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…
…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Wingnuts whining about imaginary vote fraud. Again.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:30 am
No, I was “whining” about an imaginary Ninth Circuit.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:32 am
Oh, wait – it was real.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:39 am
So, since they were denied rights by a “racist” system those rights must be restored, right?
That’s actually good news: now all those felons can starting serving as a “jury of their peers” for the Democrats, too.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Ya know, if there is clear evidence that these people are incarcerated because of their race or ethnicity, isn’t the proper course to, say, order a retrial or release them?
January 8th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Things Liberal politicians like #34 – A captive audience.
January 8th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Hey, did you know that 90% of Minnesota’s prison population is male? Did you know that far more males get DWI’s than females? It’s obvious that the man is keeping the man under his thumb.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Then wouldn’t it also be wrong to deny convicted felons in prison of their 2nd Amendment right?
January 8th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Angry Clown lied:
Wingnuts whining about imaginary vote fraud. Again.
In the WA gubernatorial election of 2004 the courts found that over one thousand of the tallied votes were cast fraudulently. The winner’s margin was 169 votes.
January 8th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
K, Chuck, Nerd,
Don’t be silly. This isn’t about anyone’s rights. This is about getting Democrats elected.
January 8th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Got a source for that Terrrrrrry?
January 8th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Know how to use Google, Angry Clown?
Letm em see what you could use for search terms. Maybe “Washington governor election 2004”?
When you wrote “Wingnuts whining about imaginary vote fraud. Again.” you were completely uninformed.
January 8th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Here’s the link for that Google search, Terry:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%E2%80%9CWashington+governor+election+2004%E2%80%B3&start=10&sa=N&fp=aa0e561cd8821793
It ain’t there. Lemme know when you have a source.
January 8th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
I’m torn on this one. The idea that the government can suspend your voting rights by convicting you of a felony bothers me because it seems that the threshold of felony seems to be falling, like for drug possession alone. If you can indict a ham sandwich today, you may be able to silence a blogger tomorrow.
January 8th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Angry Clown-
A better place you to start might be self-reflection; “Why do I believe that politicians and their cronies, with the opportunity, motive, and will to illegally interfere with an election, choose not do so”?
January 8th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Here’s Angryclown’s self-reflection of the day: “Why does Terry believe Angryclown will take the word of a crazed wingnut when they so often talk out their asses?”
Terry, get a No. 2 pencil and fill in one of the two circles below:
0 Put up
0 Shut up
January 8th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
So it`s ok to “jail too many minorities”, but not ok to keep them from voting?
January 8th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Angry Clown: I am not your research assistant.
This was all over the national news FOR MONTHS!
You know chapter and verse about the FL 2000 presidential election, nothing about Washington state 2004. I may not have ‘proved’ my claim by providing you with information that is readily and easily on the internet from a variety of sources, but I have proved conclusively that you are not inclined to investigate voter fraud when a close election is awarded by judges to the party you favor.
But what the heck:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/06/AR2005060600190.html
January 9th, 2010 at 1:31 am
From the article Terry cited
Gregoire had been widely expected to win the November election, but the first mechanical vote count put Rossi ahead by 261 votes. A second count, also by machine, whittled his lead to 42 votes, a margin of barely more than one-thousandth of a percent of the 3 million votes cast.
The Republican secretary of state certified Rossi as governor-elect in early December. But, aided by an influx of cash left over from Sen. John F. Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, the state’s Democrats raised enough money for a statewide recount of the ballots by hand.
Rossi appeared to be leading through the first several days of the recount. But then the elections director in populous Seattle area King County — a heavily Democratic section that is Gregoire’s home base — found more than 500 absentee ballots that had not been counted. Court battles raged back and forth about which ballots should have been disqualified, but with the final tally reached two days before Christmas, Gregoire was found to have won by 129 votes.
Hmm, Republican wins first two vote counts, dems get a recount and “magically” find ballots in an extremely democratic area? Sounds a lot like what Franken did here…
January 9th, 2010 at 9:50 am
Terry observed: “Angry Clown: I am not your research assistant.”
True enough. You lack the qualifications.
You make a fatal mistake when you assume Angryclown doesn’t know about the 2004 election for Washington governor. Angryclown sees all. Angryclown knows all. He merely wished to trap you on the ground of facts, not assertions – the ground where wingnuts prefer to fight.
Yes, there were ballots that were improperly cast and counted in an extraordinarily close election. Small error rates that decide close elections may be inevitable, at least with the current local patchwork of local regulation and wide variation among the technologies used to count the vote. Angryclown is in favor of improving all of these. You? Where’s your legislation to ensure that every vote is honest and every voter has the opportunity to vote?
Here’s what you kooks missed when you bleat about “vote fraud”:
“Bridges, who found no evidence of fraud, said Republicans who challenged the count failed to prove those votes affected the outcome.”
and
“Although Bridges in his ruling found flaws in the state electoral system, he said there was no evidence of deliberate fraud or problems that could be pinned to partisan bias.”
Errors and fraud aren’t the same thing. If the count had gone Rossi’s way, you silly wingnut beeyotches would have made the same argument, to the extent you even engaged with the issue beyond the “sore loser!” level.
The 2000 election should have provided the impetus for fixing the voting system on the federal and state levels. You wingnuts opposed reform when the system put your guy in the White House, then bawled like newborns when it gave you Chris Gregoire and Stuart Smalley. That is why Angryclown laughs at you.
January 9th, 2010 at 11:23 am
Angry Clown, we may be reaching a convergence of goals.
I want every legally-cast vote to count. This should not be a conservative/liberal divide. If someone legally votes D and another person illegally votes R, that D voter has his or her vote nullified as effectively as if that person was prevented from voting by a gang of thugs.
You seem to put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the judge in WA found errors, but not fraud. True, but fraud is very difficult to prove. If the errors tend to benefit one party (I think that this is the argument that Rossi’s lawyers were making), those erroneously counted ballots can determine the outcome of an election. Unless the illegal WA votes (most of them cast by felons) were split close to 50/50, the wrong person was declared the winner.
Political parties have access to statistical tools and software that they did not have a few decades ago. In a winner-take-all system like ours it does a candidate, or a political party, no good to get more than 51% of the vote. The most efficient way to spend campaign dollars is to spread it out so it will do the most good. Ideally a political party would spend just enough to get 51% of the vote in every election. For this reason we can expect more elections like Washington 2004 & MN in 2008. If an election can be turned on a few thousand ballots that should never have been allowed to have been cast we don’t have a democracy, we have rule by judges and lawyers.
January 11th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
AC, it seems that all of the difficulties in counting votes correctly seem to be coming from areas that lean Democratic–Seattle 2004, Palm Beach County in 2000, Twin Cities & Iron Range in 2008. Why is that? Should we assume that Democrats are merely uniformly incompetent, or that they are crooked?
Or does it matter?
January 11th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Like a dog’s hind leg.