VOTING RIGHTS

[HairOfTheDog]

If you've paid your debt to society do you deserve to have your voting rights restored?

I say 'yes'.

Here in California, citizens with felony records can vote if they're not incarcerated in prison and have completed any parole requirements at the time of the election.

Essentially, once they've paid their debt and had their full civil rights restored, citizens in California can vote. That's the way it should be nationally, in my opinion.

But, it's up to the individual states and some states have very old laws on the books which disenfranchise a hell of a lot of people who've paid their debts from voting; Florida (especially), Iowa, and Kentucky are the most prohibitive -- accounting for millions of lost potential votes.

Considering the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate per-capita in the world, it shouldn't have surprised me when I read that more than 6 million U.S. citizens who'd paid their debts under the criminal justice system were nonetheless prohibited from voting in 2016. But, it did surprise me. That's more citizens than the population of most of the states in our republic.