So it seems if a Constitutional Amendment filed by State Rep. Marcus Hunter (D-Monroe) becomes law. He has filed HB 322 which would allow convicted felons to vote while they’re serving their prison sentences. Sadly, this is not a late April Fool’s Joke.

Here’s what Article I, Section 10 of the Louisiana State Constitution reads now:

Section 10.(A) Right to Vote. Every citizen of the state, upon reaching eighteen years of age, shall have the right to register and vote, except that this right may be suspended while a person is interdicted and judicially declared mentally incompetent or is under an order of imprisonment for conviction of a felony.

Hunter’s bill removes “or is under an order of imprisonment for conviction of a felony.” This follows on the heels of State Senator Karen Carter Peterson’s bill that automatically register all Louisiana drivers to vote.

As Scott McKay said in his post about Karen Carter Peterson’s bill, this is an attempt by the Louisiana Democrat Party to degrade the Louisiana electorate. The Louisiana Democrat Party can’t win elections in this state as long as the current people who vote continue to vote. So they have to expand the Louisiana electorate to put as many lazy people, apathetic people, and now imprisoned felons on the voter rolls as possible.

Currently, Louisiana restores voting rights for all felons once their sentence is completed. That’s the right thing to do. These people paid their debts to society and they should have their rights restored.

That’s not the issue here. The issue is whether prison inmates should have the right to vote while they’re in prison. The answer to that is a clear no. These people should not be allowed to vote while serving their sentence for two reasons.

The first reason is that these people are serving a punishment for a crime. When you go to prison, you lose many of your rights as payment of your debt to society. Losing the right to take part in politics should be one of those, as long as you are serving your sentence.

The second and biggest reason why we don’t allow prisoners to vote is that the vote of a prisoner can be easily manipulated. A prisoner can come under pressure from prison guards and wardens to vote a certain way. Also,  many prisoners can be intimidated by other prisoners to vote a certain way. The ballots of prisoners are more susceptible to fraud because they must be mailed to the prisons. Finally, what’s to stop someone from using prison records to ask for bogus absentee ballots?

A responsible public official would consider these things, and the integrity of the elections process, before they decided to write a bill to degrade the Louisiana electorate like this. Then again, the Democrat Party delegation in the legislature are not responsible public officials, as Karen Carter Peterson and Marcus Hunter prove.