Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States

Dennis Thompson has written an outstanding book that discusses a number of important issues relating to how we conduct elections.I want to take particular issue with the first reviewer, who seems literally unable to understand why denial of the vote to felons after they have served there sentence might be thought to raise serious problems. Even those who say, "Do the crime, pay the time," might see that once one has indeed paid the time, it makes a lot of sense to try to integrate the individual back into the society. Why should we require the person in effect to wear a scarlet F that makes him or her a permanent outsider and will only increase the probability of frustration, resentment, and ultimate recidivism? An intermediate policy would require that the released felon not violate the law for, say, three years. But what in the world justifies the lifetime ban that many states have adopted? Moreover, given that we live in a country that "felonizes" and incarcerates more people, per capita, than practically any other country on earth--and we really shouldn't be proud of being in the company of our only close competitors--it is important that those who have experienced incarceration have a political voice. Perhaps we might have done something with our insane drug laws had the hundreds of thousands of released felons jailed because of drugs been able to vote. Or we might actually try to give prisoners some job training rather than treat them in ways that add to the likelihood that they will be recidivists. And, of course, there's the practical reality that the exclusion of felons from the electorate has disproportionate effect on African-Americans, especially when, as in Florida in 2000, a zealously Republican administration is recklessly indifferent to making sure that the persons it is trying to eliminate from the voting rolls were actually felons instead of simply having a name similar to that of a felon. There's no justification for treating released felons as permanent "non-persons." One might disagree with everything I say, just as one doesn't have to agree with everything that Thompson says. But it is foolish to dismiss his arguments, whether about felons or about anything else he discusses. He is one of our most thoughtful political theorists, and he's been writing about the practical meaning of democracy for the past 35 years. Anything he writes, most certainly including this book, is well worth reading.Sanford LevinsonUniversity of Texas Law School