Pete Buttigieg Says Incarcerated People Shouldn't Get to Vote
48 replies, posted
https://www.gq.com/story/pete-buttigieg-voting-rights?utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&mbid=social_facebook&utm_brand=gq&fbclid=IwAR2iLJwN6_9zURYc7Ns1tJzZ5Aqugje8ThKY9D9COBP79xFeZSdqemzTcMI
On Monday night, CNN hosted a marathon speed-dating series of town
halls for Democratic presidential contenders. Toward the tail end, Pete Buttigieg,
the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the first openly gay man to run
for president came out against the right for people to vote while
incarcerated.
Earlier in the night, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders repeated a point he made earlier this month,
that the rest of the country should follow Vermont and Maine's lead and
allow people to vote even while they're incarcerated. When Anderson
Cooper asked about his stance, Buttigieg gave a quick, "no." He
elaborated: "Part of the punishment when you are convicted of a crime
and you're incarcerated is you lose certain rights. You lose your
freedom. And I think during that period it does not make sense to have
an exception for the right to vote."
He did grant that ex-felons should be able to vote once released from prison.
Pete Buttigieg says you are a sub citizen once you enter jail.
lol this guy's gonna win the nomination and it's gonna fucking suck
The problem is that if any American is denied the right to vote, that not only infringes on their right, but infringes on the rights of anyone who shares a demographic with them, be it race, sexuality, or political party.
Emphasis on race in this case, since African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.
*While incarcerated, Bernie endorsed voting while in prison.
Well, he lost his votes. There's a lot of people in prison, and they vote.
Is he though? The DNC isn't going to put any of their effort behind him until Biden hopefully crashes and burns. So for the time being, he's on his own. And he a a huge amount of competition.
U.S. citizenship guarantees the right to vote, period. Once you start denying that right for any reason, no matter how reasonable it seems at first, you open the door for denying the right to vote for increasingly more arbitrary and destructive reasons. There will always be extreme cases, yes, like the Boston Marathon bomber as CNN loves to remind us, but the fact of the matter is that millions of ordinary people are trapped in our dysfunctional justice system without any voice to change things for the better.
God, can't wait to hold my nose and vote for a sexual harasser to try to get a much worse sexual harasser out of the white house.
(Thankfully, I'm a lot more optimistic about Bernie's chances this time. I don't think Biden is going to win this. He doesn't have the one advantage Hillary did over Bernie, in that she's a woman, and some people voted for her in the primary on that sole basis.)
If a criminal can be the president, they can certainly fucking vote.
Fuck Pete Buttigieg.
Canada allowed inmates to vote for a brief period in the 90s.
What does Buttigieg think prisoners will vote for, the Legalize Everything Party?
If I was an American voter, I'd be ready to accept and vote for a woman President.
But not that woman. Bernie should've won, but McConnell would've demolished his first two years and the Russian disinfo agitprop would've tried to give Republicans an even tighter stranglehold on Congress. If Bernie had won there'd be two vacant SCOTUS seats right now.
this is not an uncommon opinion. The issue has always been one around permanent not temporary disenfranchisement. Bernie's point is that any caveat that lets one strip another of the right to vote weakens the whole system and leads to further disenfranchisement, like permanent disenfranchisement of felons
I've never quite understood the mentality behind allowing felons to vote, but it seems like it's pretty well-agreed on here. Would anyone break it down for me?
I think it's partly because I've only seen hot takes or oversimplifications of the argument, but I'd also agree with the social contract argument, maybe because it's the only one I've seen in-depth.
People have posted several reasons in here already.
I didn't quite understand your post and didn't want to come off as confrontational -- but isn't stripping rights just part of the process when someone is sentenced? I'd agree that our prison system is massively flawed and I know that it disproportionately affects minorities, but is that the main thrust of the argument?
My argument that was that taking away anyone's voting rights doesn't only affect them. If you're black and you don't get incarcerated, but the disproportionate incarceration of blacks means there are a lower proportion of black people able to vote, your rights are being infringed as well, even if you still have the right to vote. Do you see why that is? Voter suppression works the same way. Discouraging poor and minorities from voting by making it harder infringes on the rights of even the poor and minorities that DO vote, because it means that the demographics they represent aren't being fairly represented at the polls.
That does make more sense, I don't think I've seen that point of view. If our justice system actually worked and conviction rates were a 1:1 ratio with our population, would you still be in favor of voting rights for felons?
I think I'm starting to come around to your thinking, though. Similar arguments swayed a younger me against voter ID laws, certain firearm laws, etc. I can't believe this isn't a point brought up more often in the mainstream, I never would have realized the secondary effects of disproportionate incarceration like this on my own.
Among other reasons, politicians can criminalize arbitrary things to silence minorities, adversarial demographics. E.g. Conservatives in the US and drug policy under the Nixon administration. Nixon official (Vox, left bias, high factual reporting via Media Bias Check)
Most convincing to me is the fact that many areas still count the ineligible prisoners in census counts! This is known as prison gerrymandering, plenty of resources can be found easily on the subject.
Why deprive them of the right? How do you suppose social contract theory relates to this issue? Contract theory doesn't serve to justify the extent to which we should punish crimes. Are we seeking to rehabilitate criminals or punish them? Modern prisons should seek reductions in recidivism and try to improve society at large.
If there are sufficient prisoners in an area for it to be an issue in terms of election outcome, surely that is symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem.
Just for some extra input here, in respect to rights for felons I really dislike the idea of being able to wholesale remove a persons rights, I believe it causes problems as Helix said, and it also causes problems for the person in question when they get out.
Basically it's like a gateway to the myriad problems our justice system has. Prisons have the ability to make someone an "unperson" for their stint in the slammer, then expect no negative effects when they flip that switch back to "person" not to mention we are only trusting their word on properly restoring these rights anyway.
This causes prison populations to go forgotten and uncared about, which can lead to things like a lack of oversight and positive change for them because it's ok not to care about felons. This can also cause higher recidivism because they have barely been a person for who knows how long, and they are now expected to suddenly resume with nothing, in a world with people and employers that label them that same "unperson" they were before.
Essentially, it's a complicated issue for sure, but I would say having proper representation and rights for prisoners is at least as important as loosening the grip of private prisons in terms of ways to reform that horrible industry.
What justification is there to strip the right to vote?
The rights that are taken from felons are supposed to be specifically chosen to serve society.That is, rights are stripped from criminals to solve very specific problems (such as keeping society safe from them).
What imminent societal threat is there to allowing felons to vote? If your answer is "felons will vote for bad things", your argument is basically "they have the wrong opinions, so they can't vote." That's completely independent of their criminality, and it's unacceptable.
Being a criminal is not cart blanche to just strip all your rights away. It's not a goddamn buffet of rights that you, the on-high moral and perfect society, get to delight over.
I think it's super fucked up that prison labor could exploit someone who isn't allowed to vote. Comitting a crime should not set you back to ancient greece slave status.
I don't believe in stripping someone of the right to vote, but if it happens to someone who also works a critically underpaid job behind bars and under threat of force then it's the most messed up thing
I'm on the fence about felons voting, to me it depends on the severity of the crime by the felon. If your crime was so heinous, I have to question your sanity, I don't believe you should have a voice in how the country is run. Votes should come from rational people, not rapists, serial killers, murderers, etc. If you did some drugs and got busted, or committed petty theft, or some other low tier crime, I have no problem with you voting.
@Helix Snake
...Discouraging poor and minorities from voting by making it harder infringes on the rights of even the poor and minorities that DO vote, because it means that the demographics they represent aren't being fairly represented at the polls.
I don't see how its infringing on the right of people that do vote. Are you saying that because one political party isn't getting the amount of votes it could have gotten, the votes counted in aren't truly representative of all the people that belong to that political party, and this misrepresentation is infringing the rights of those that have voted(since their voice is collectively 'weaker')?
Plenty of regular citizens have way more fucked up political beliefs than some murderers or serial killers, yet they're not forbidden to vote.
He's literally just describing the process by which republicans artificially reduce the democrats voter base by criminilizing stuff that results in disproportionate incarceration of minorities.
@axel
Plenty of regular citizens have way more fucked up political beliefs than some murderers or serial killers, yet they're not forbidden to vote.
Hypothetically, a serial-killer could hunt down and kill everyone that is at political odds with him, silencing his opponents right to vote via murder, and still retain his right to vote. What would you have to say about this? Cause I believe that person should not have the right to vote.
If we're getting into hypotheticals, a giant magic sky bunny could come down and gobble up the Earth if you have the roght to vote. Guess we better take it away just to be safe!
I would like to think we have moved past these sorts of "eye for a eye" punishments. We no longer cut hands for thievery or kill people for murder (mostly), and as such why should we restrict voting rights for taking away voting rights? What does that kind of punishment do to help reform the prisoner or make the society safe from future acts of crime?
The reality is not that we have rampant serial murderers running amok. Policy should not be dictated by statistically insignificant concerns. What fraction of the prison population is actually convicted of a crime so heinous?
Most crimes are non-violent. Rather than turning to hypotheticals we should look to reality. We have an extremely high incarceration rate.
Do you trust the state to decide what crimes are worthy of stripping someone of their right to vote?
Do you trust the state with the same reservations to whether or not someone should be allowed to own firearms based on mental health conditions? Should someone who has beaten their wife be allowed to own firearms?
The gun may take one life, the vote effects millions of lives.
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