Felon\'s Right to Vote Major

¶ … Felon's Right to Vote major violation of human rights is occurring in the United States today, and has been for many years despite no Constitutional precedent for it (ProCon.org). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN and its member countries in 1948 says in Article Six that "everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law," and in Article Eight that "everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law" (UN.org). There is no federal law that disenfranchises convicted felons or those in prison and on parole, yet only two states in the country allow felons to vote while incarcerated, and only thirteen states (and the District of Columbia) let felons vote upon release from prison (ProCon.org). In contrast, twenty-three states do not allow felons to vote until they have completed parole or even probation, and the remaining twelve states have laws that could permanently disenfranchise felons depending on various circumstances of their crime and conviction (ProCon.org). This is a clear violation of the felons' human rights.

A first became aware of this issue during high school, in my U.S. history class. We were studying the 1920 presidential bid of Eugene V. Debs, his last in a series of five presidential runs and the only one he conducted from prison, to which he had been sentenced for ten years speaking out against World War I (Eugene V. Debs Foundation [EDF hereafter]). Debs had also been permanently disenfranchised by his conviction under the War-Time Espionage Act, and his fellow prisoners were not allowed to vote either, yet despite these injustice Debs managed to gather over one million votes as a third party candidate who had been unable to make any public speeches or appearances -- an amazing feat for an imprisoned felon (EDF).

A found his story to be personally inspiring as well as frustrating and aggravating -- there is no crime so terrible that the person who committed it should not be given a voice in the making of it a crime -- that is, the individual does not need to recognize a crime, so long as his voice is counted in the popular consensus. When his voice is removed, the laws he is held subject to lose all rationality, especially in a democracy. E.B. White, in response to the Nuremberg trials, said something akin to "If a man hangs, it does not spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him" (paraphrase mine). This was as true of these trails of Nazi war criminals as it is of our citizen felons. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to "effective remedy" by the "national tribunals" (UN.org). By denying felons the right to vote, their access to "effective remedy" is essentially non-existent.