Eric Holder wants millions of convicted felons to vote, urging states to change existing laws.
Holder Urges States to Repeal Bans on Felons’ Voting:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday urged states to repeal laws that prohibit felons from voting, a move that would restore the right to vote to millions of people.The call was mostly symbolic — Mr. Holder has no authority to enact these changes himself — but it marked the attorney general’s latest effort to eliminate laws that he says disproportionately keep minorities from the polls. “It is unwise, it is unjust, and it is not in keeping with our democratic values,” Mr. Holder said at civil rights conference at Georgetown University. These laws deserve to be not only reconsidered, but repealed.”African-Americans represent more than a third of the estimated 5.8 million people who are prohibited from voting, according to the Sentencing Project, a research group that favors more liberal sentencing policies. And in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, more than one in five African-Americans has lost the right to vote.
There may be a more severe impact on minority communities, but that’s a function of the convictions, not the voting laws.
Perhaps there should be a waiting period, or lifetime exclusions only for certain levels of criminal convictions.
Regardless, I think it’s probably going nowhere.
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