I am dead set against those serving time in jail getting the right to vote. But even if you see jail as pure punishment and not a place where a criminal pays a debt to society, once someone has been released, I believe their right to vote should be restored.Many of the laws that prevent ex-convicts from voting were passed long ago when it was thought that convicts had forfeited their rights in many areas because of their transgressions against society. In the south, such laws were used to depress the number of African American voters. Today, many states recognize that it is patently unfair to deny someone the right to vote because of what they did in their past:Felony disenfranchisement - often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests - affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these...(Read Full Post)