1 vote on its own doesn't matter, however, the collective vote of undesirables in a country with the highest incarceration rate on earth could really fuck shit up for the elites who seek to control the population.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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What is the rationale of not letting felons vote? I'm guessing a felon is something significant like murder or aggravated assault?
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Most people would rather vilify than forgive.
Given how little one vote matters, we have a much more serious problem here: why should any individual vote?
For any one person, the chance that even one election in their lifetime will have its outcome altered by their vote is vanishingly small.
Therefore, in terms of practical effect, each individual always faces this awareness: that whether and how they vote is purely symbolic in its effect
It's the nature of democracy that one vote equals 1/N of the population. That is not flaw with the individual. It just means that for his vote to actually means something, it has to be part of a social memetic arrangements and not cast in the abstract.
Of course with first past the post, the electoral colege, gerrymandering all conspiring to further devalue and skew the value of one vote, democratic voting becomes increasingly meaningless. This is not a flaw of the individual but of the system itself being corrupt.
And then we have yet another layer of disenfranchisement, which is republicanism, in which voters do not directly vote for their interest but vote for an agent which will have a long term in which to "interpret" whatever the electorate really meant by voting for him. He will do so in a space where the constantly fluctuating social memetic arrangements that got him elected are not really under his control and are only loosely, and shortly affected by his action.
This is because the control of the fluctuating social memetic arrangement is in the hand of the actual social elite, the people who own or have seized the megaphone of power and who grossly compete and collude. Largely to maintain the arrangement, usually in an uneasy peace with their immediate competitors. These people are not just politicials but media moguls, celebrities and other billionaires.
Any solution to this problem must look to the system as a whole and create incentives to the individual that will enable him to at least have his 1/N power over the state of things. Free of the influence of the actual social elite who fill his heads with ideas that benefit them rather than the individual. And in a way where individual can act collectively for their interests.
There are two tricky parts that come with allowing prisoners to vote that must be considered. Not hard stops, but just additional dynamics that will be in place.
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Prisoners have little to no autonomy, and can therefore be easily coerced into voting a certain way. If the warden/prison staff lean conservative and they hear that a certain prisoner voted liberal, that prisoner is vulnerable to reprisal. There would need to be an additional entity present in prisons to enforce privacy of voting results. But how do we guarantee that this government entity won't just collude with the other government entity running the prison?
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There may be problems in terms of where these votes are counted for. One way to protect the anonymity of prison votes is to pool them among the district that houses the prison. But do we let the prisoners vote for local candidates/laws when they are not locals? In many cases, prisons are located in very small towns and may therefore significantly skew local elections if they participate in them. So does everyone get an absentee ballot for their place of origin instead? Even if the duration of their sentence means they are likely never to go back there? Or do prisoners only get to vote on items/candidates at the federal level?
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