"Felons Can Be in the Military, Just Not in the Ballot Box"
Scott Moss writes on Concurring Opinions about two news stories: That is: if we trust felons (at least some of them) enough to let them carry guns and have access to our military in the middle of a war, I can't see an argument that there's any valid reason to prevent them from voting.
It always has been striking how courts strain to avoid invalidating felon disenfranchisement laws. Though I am not a voting rights expert, to my limited review of the case law, the holdings declaring such laws permissible under the Voting Rights Act seem particularly weak; the Act bans practices that have a disparate impact by race (as disenfranchisement laws do), and some courts seem to have avoided finding a violation by reasoning, "Congress didn't intend for its ban on racial disparate impacts to invalidate felon disenfranchisement laws" (I'm paraphrasing). The best response I can give is what Justice Scalia wrote in holding same-sex sexual harassment actionable under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a statute that clearly was intended as a ban on race (and to a lesser extent sex) discrimination in hiring by a Congress that surely never considered same-sex issues in employment:
[M]ale-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII. But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed. (emphasis added)-- Felons Can Be in the Military, Just Not in the Ballot Box