Here's an UnderstatementFrom a
column on why felons should be allowed to vote:
Joseph Hayden and Jalil Abdul Muntaqim aren't the most sympathetic guys in the world. Hayden served 13 years in New York prisons for killing a man during an argument in Harlem in 1986. Released three years ago, he'll be on parole until 2007.
Muntaqim was convicted of shooting two police officers in the 1970s, when he belonged to the Black Liberation Army. He's doing life in an upstate prison and probably will never get out.The columnist's rationale for allowing these pukes to vote?
But the most convincing argument against these laws is this one: What purpose do they serve?
"What does it accomplish?" asks Frances Fox Piven, a professor at the City University of New York's graduate school and an expert on American voting habits. "It's certainly not an effective form of punishment, since a lot of people don't have that kind of faith and love for the right to vote. So there's nothing to be lost, and maybe something to be gained, by making the right to vote universal."Let's flip that around. What is gained by allowing felons to vote? Nothing either (other than helping Democrats win, which is the real point).
