Felons and the vote: people's panel

Read through the responses here America is one of the rare countries which punishes felons by stripping away their right to vote, sometimes for well after they have served their full prison sentences, and sometimes permanently. Earlier this month, the Sentencing Project released a report which estimates that currently 5.85 million Americans – up from 1.2 million in 1976 – are prevented from voting because of a past felony. About 45% of this group, or 2.6 million people have completed their sentence, but live in one of the country's 11 states that disfranchise people post-sentence through a range of opaque and poorly understood rules. This includes former convicts like Bruce Reilly, now a law student in New Orleans. This week, Reilly wrote about how his long and ultimately successful campaign in Rhode Island to restore the right to vote to felons like himself has been rendered irrelevant since he moved to Louisiana as a graduate student. America's policy of not allowing former felons to vote also disproportionately affects the African American community, preventing over 7% of black Americans from voting. Do you think America's policy of barring former felons from voting benefits or diminishes its electoral democracy? How so? And if you are or have been a felon whose voting rights have been affected, what does not having a vote mean to you? Please fill out the form below by Friday, July 27, at 9pm, and we will publish selected responses.