New York Times Editorial
Voting Rights, Human Rights
Published: October 14, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/opinion/14fri4.html
The United States has the worst record in the democratic world when it
comes to stripping convicted felons of the right to vote. Of the nearly five
million people who were barred from participating in the last presidential
election, for example, most, if not all, would have been free to vote if
they had been citizens of any one of dozens of other nations. Many of those
nations cherish the franchise so deeply that they let inmates vote from
their prison cells.
Courts outside this country are actually expanding the rights of prison
inmates to cast ballots, on the theory that the right to vote is a basic
human right that should be abridged only after careful deliberation and
under the rarest circumstances. That message was underscored last week in a
strong ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which has jurisdiction
in the nations that are parties to the European Convention, a rights charter
drafted more than a half-century ago.
The European court overturned a British law that banned all convicted
prison inmates from voting. The British law, however, is far less onerous
than laws in the United States, which imprisons people at five times the
rate of Britain and disenfranchises millions, many of them permanently.
The European court recognized that nations have the right to limit voting
in some cases, but it condemned blanket prohibitions as unacceptable. This
ruling includes a clear warning to the dozen other European Convention
countries that prohibit voting for convicted prisoners or have no provisions
for allowing inmates to participate in elections. Laws that deny citizens
access to the polls should be employed only after painstaking deliberation -
if at all - and never in a fashion that bars an entire class of people from
the polls.
This issue deserves a full hearing in the United States, which shows less
regard for the rights of prisoners and ex-offenders than just about any of
its peers.