Felons should not have a say in society

The argument

The argument for disenfranchisement rests on what a vote is taken to be. Voting is not treated here as a possession a person holds regardless of conduct but as a share in deciding what happens to a community, an exercise of authority over other people's lives as well as one's own. Who should hold such a share is therefore a question that can properly be asked, and on this view the answer turns on whether a person can be relied on to use it for the community's good. By committing a felony, proponents argue, a person has answered that question themselves. A felony is not an offence against an abstraction; it harms the community the offender lives in, and in committing it they showed a lack of respect for it. The act is treated as evidence about the person rather than as an isolated incident: it shows what they were prepared to do to the people around them when it suited them, and that disposition is precisely what a vote would place in their hands. This is why the restriction is framed as permanent rather than as part of a sentence. Only citizens who want the best for their communities should be able to vote, since the purpose of the franchise is to aggregate the judgements of people invested in the common good. Felons have proven that they do not value the community's wellbeing, and giving them the right to vote would enable them to have a say in what happens to the very community they have harmed, handing influence over its future to someone who has shown they will act against it. For this reason, on this account, they should be disenfranchised: felons should never be allowed to vote.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Felons, once they have served their sentence, have repaid their debt to their community in the eyes of the law. There is no reason to continually punish them, especially when it blocks their progress in reintegrating themselves into society and discourages them from becoming invested in the community. This argument also assumes that felons are beyond change. It argues that because felons disregarded their community's wellbeing in the past, they will retain their disregard for the rest of their lives. Felons are capable of becoming upstanding citizens and leaving their past behind.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Felons have completed their punishment and should not have their right to help dictate their community's future taken away.