Should incarceration mean the eradication of basic civil liberties granted to every citizen of the United States under the Constitution? That answer should obviously be no, however in the United States penitentiary system the deprivation of the legal right to vote, also known as disenfranchisement, is quite common. So much so that as of 2006 it was estimated that 5.3 million people were declared ineligible to vote as a result of their conviction, 1.7 million of which have already completed their sentencing and are no longer in prison. Since the late 1990s there has been a large movement towards felon enfranchisement, which is a positive step for the country in various ways. Disenfranchisement should not be allowed because it shows that rehabilitation
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At the time, Florida’s disenfranchising laws were preventing around 600,000 convicted people from voting in the election. Since Bush won the election by a mere 537 votes, if just 1% of the felon population had been able to vote, the entire election could have reversed and the country would have seen Al Gore as the 43rd president. In order to find out if this outcome would have occurred had prisoners been able to vote, social scientists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza used existed trends and performed a statistical analysis to estimate how these disenfranchised people would have voted if allowed. They assumed that 27% of the disenfranchised people would have actually exercised their right to vote and that about 69% of them would have voted Democratic. This brought them to the conclusion that “if ex-felons among the disenfranchised had been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have won Florida by over 62,000 votes” (Reiman, p. 5). By applying the same techniques, Uggen and Manza also discovered that six Senate races won by Republicans actually would have been won by Democrats and would have resulted in 60 Democrat senators which then would have had a large impact on the laws enacted during that time
At the time, Florida’s disenfranchising laws were preventing around 600,000 convicted people from voting in the election. Since Bush won the election by a mere 537 votes, if just 1% of the felon population had been able to vote, the entire election could have reversed and the country would have seen Al Gore as the 43rd president. In order to find out if this outcome would have occurred had prisoners been able to vote, social scientists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza used existed trends and performed a statistical analysis to estimate how these disenfranchised people would have voted if allowed. They assumed that 27% of the disenfranchised people would have actually exercised their right to vote and that about 69% of them would have voted Democratic. This brought them to the conclusion that “if ex-felons among the disenfranchised had been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have won Florida by over 62,000 votes” (Reiman, p. 5). By applying the same techniques, Uggen and Manza also discovered that six Senate races won by Republicans actually would have been won by Democrats and would have resulted in 60 Democrat senators which then would have had a large impact on the laws enacted during that time