{"id":7733,"date":"2010-01-08T07:32:04","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T12:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7733"},"modified":"2010-01-08T07:32:04","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T12:32:04","slug":"when-there-just-arent-enough-dead-people-voting-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7733","title":{"rendered":"When There Just Aren’t Enough Dead People Voting For You…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…then the Democrats can be assured to\u00a0start trolling the prisons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all <\/em>convicts is wrong.<\/p>\n

Who could possibly make such a ruling?\u00a0 (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):<\/p>\n

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals <\/strong>in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.<\/p>\n

Patterico, from a larger analysis <\/a>that you should read in its entirety:<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, you\u2019re 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.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?<\/p>\n

I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller <\/em>decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence.\u00a0 Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…<\/p>\n

…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…then the Democrats can be assured to\u00a0start 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,18,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-pc","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7733"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7742,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7733\/revisions\/7742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}