Democratic Senator from Vermont, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said on CNN that he considers necessary to provide an opportunity to vote at elections prisoners serving sentences.
As noted by Sanders, Vermont’s laws from the beginning were granted the right to vote to prisoners without any harmful political and social consequences. The man also allows inmates to vote from their cells no matter what crime they have committed. 2016 California says to vote for convicted felons serving time in County jail.
The Republican national Committee immediately responded to this proposal, stating that it is opposed to «convicted terrorists, perpetrators of sexual crimes, and murderers vote from prison.» Senator Lindsey Graham on Twitter criticized Sanders for wanting to vote the Boston terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and mass murderer of the Charleston Dilana Rufus.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse….@BernieSanders supports allowing rapists, murderers, and terrorists – like the Boston bomber and Dylan Roof, the individual who massacred 9 church-goers in Charleston, to vote from prison. https://t.co/1wd8EBJHiS
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 23, 2019
The question is, where and how in the legislation there was a prohibition for the participation of prisoners in the elections, became interested in the Politico today. According to the publication, deprivation of the right to vote was only one of the penalties imposed on the English prisoners in accordance with the concept of «civil death.» The vote was considered a sacred right which could be granted only law-abiding. In accordance with English law, the convicts were dead and therefore could not vote.
The colonists brought civil death United States, but gradually withdrew from many of the more severe penalties associated with tradition. However, in many States, in addition to loss of voting rights, a convicted felon may not run for elected office after his release from prison. He can’t serve in the jury, can not become a COP or join the army. He can’t get a state license to work in certain professions. In many States it is now prohibited to participate in voting selectively for those convicted to certain crimes.
Many talk about the fear that prisoners will vote in solidarity as a unit, and will dominate politics in the rural towns where the majority of prisons. But in Vermont, for example, prisoners have to register to vote using your last legal address, thus distributing their votes across the state.
Sean Morales-Doyle, Advisor to the democracy Programme in the heart of justice Brennan, said Newsweek: «overall, we are lagging significantly behind most other democratic countries, taking away voting rights from people who are not in prison. And we definitely differ in that in any part of the country, you could permanently lose their right to vote on the basis of conviction for a criminal offence».
Now prisoners can vote in most countries of Western Europe and even in Russia. The UN in 2006-m year, condemned the United States for the limitation of the voting rights. «The United States should take appropriate measures to ensure that States restore voting rights of citizens who have fully served their sentence, and those who have been released conditionally-ahead of schedule», — said the UN Committee on human rights, noting that the laws on the deprivation of civil rights are discriminatory and violate international law.
