A typically long and exhaustive profile on voter suppression in this week’s New Yorker starts with an anecdote of a middle-aged black woman from Ohio who had voted in every election since she was 18 having her registration questioned as a result of being flagged by right wing efforts to stifle poor people from voting.
This is when voter suppression is easy to identify.
It’s not so easy when to notice, or to defend, when the voter in question is a convicted child murderer and accused cannibal who lives in a mental institution. But such is the case with Michael Woodmansee, who killed an eight-year-old boy in 1975 and was released early from prison last year and applied for an absentee ballot this year.
Rhode Island, like 35 other states, allows felons to vote after they have served out their debt to society, according to ProCon.org.
In Alabama, Delaware and Mississippi, murders permanently lose the right to vote, and in Florida a convicted murderer can petition the state for the right to vote after seven years. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote while incarcerated (by absentee ballot, of course).
Setting aside the larger philosophical dilemma of whether a murderer should be allowed to vote, because the law allows them to vote – no matter how heinous his crime – we’re obliged to let them do so. The state Board of Elections and the ACLU deserve credit for recognizing the sometimes unpleasant reality to living in a civilized society: you gotta play by the rules even when it feels yucky to do so.
Here’s the statement from the ACLU, after Joe DeLorenzo became the second member to resign from the Board of Canvassers, rather than sign Woodmansee’s ballot request.
Last week’s unlawful decision by the chair of the Cranston Board of Canvassers to deny an absentee ballot application simply because he personally opposed that person’s right to vote was an egregious violation of the democratic process. That he would do so only four years after unsuccessfully trying to bar two other residents at the Eleanor Slater Hospital from voting amounted to a flagrant case of malfeasance.
People who are institutionalized for mental illness do not lose the right to vote under the law. Nor do people who have committed heinous crimes but have served their prison time. No election official has the authority to prevent a person from voting simply because he doesn’t believe they deserve to exercise that right. Allowing this undermining of the electoral process to stand unchallenged would have established an unconscionable precedent.
While DeLorenzo (who was on Dan Yorke Monday) and Robert Muksian are certainly within their right to resign, they were also certainly not well-suited for the positions they were appointed to. Their job was to administer and oversee elections, not to determine whose crimes were atrocious enough to warrant disenfranchisement. The General Assembly, through 17.9.2-3, had already done so.
In fact, that law reads to me like Woodmansee should have been given the option of re-registering upon his release from jail.
Michael Woodmansee is the worst type of criminal, and there’s a part of me that feels like he doesn’t deserve to participate in the democratic process … but I’m pretty sure it’s better to have a good system defending a bad person than to have a good person defending a bad system.
And here I was, thinking that, maybe, R.I. Future occasionally goes out of its way to find the atypical topic that might possibly take us afield for no particular good reason.
Not to worry.
Even the Deli Llama would say, “F***** it,” when it comes to the voting rights of an accused cannibal.
(Could you find a slightly better argument against voter suppression?)
“Do they discuss cannibalism at the Taubman Center?” he said, trying, perhaps trying to butter them up.
Michael Woodmansee has done immeasurable damage to the Foreman family and to all of Rhode Island. We should not distort our laws for this aberrant man. The principle of reform, that a felon can pay their debt and rejoin society is too precious to throw away, just for some satisfaction against a person not capable of being part of society.
If we shape our law around extreme cases we will make bad laws.
I disagre with a lot of things on RIfuture, but you’re right here. While some may want to change the law, the current law is clear and Woodmansee should be allowed to register.
Not to take this too far off track, but I like this quote from Nancy Green very much:
“If we shape our law around extreme cases we will make bad laws.”
This is exactly my view of the attention over Romney’s tax rate and the “Buffet rule”. Making a law to meet an extreme, rare case.
Pretty far off track, we can talk about Mitt Romney’s extreme wealth on another thread.
I have no interest in empowering politicians to determine which crimes are bad enough to warrant losing for life one’s right to vote. Oh the abuse and vote-pandering that would bring. This is absolutely a case in which we must defend the rights of a bad person.
It is getting tiring that people are so shocked about issues surrounding Micheal Woodmansee. Shocked that he can be released early. Shocked that he can vote. We’ve had since 1975 to change these things if people thought it was so vital to do so.
The question is whether the guy has been found to be of sane mind. Has he? Why is he in Eleanor Slater if he is mentally sound?
I ask because Article II of the RI Constitution covers that:
Section 1. Persons entitled to vote. — Every citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen years or over who has had residence and home in this state for thirty days next preceding the time of voting, who has resided thirty days in the town or city from which such citizen desires to vote, and whose name shall be registered at least thirty days next preceding the time of voting as provided by law, shall have the right to vote for all offices to be elected and on all questions submitted to the electors, except that no person who has been lawfully adjudicated to be non compos mentis shall be permitted to vote.
webserver.rilin.state.ri.us/RiConstitution/C02.html
So I believe that is the basis for the Cranston Board of Canvassers to reject the application. They don’t believe he’s been lawfully judged to be of sane mind. Has he? I don’t know that answer.
It is my understanding (based on the news report) that Woodmansee voluntarily checked himself into the mental institution. I can’t say whether or not he’s been evaluated for soundness of mind though. Interesting point.
Having read the post and follow-up comments, I must admit to feeling a bit queasy.
This man has been spared the gallows for the murder of a child.
To take up his cause to vote, at this point, seems not only misguided but depraved.
Sad footnotes to history will always lurk in the corners of our world.
They are not examples of anything other than the susceptibility of some humans to madness.
To make these pathetic cases the basis of some sort of principled argument strips that notion
itself of a good deal of its value.
Years go by, and people forget intolerable pain and mental cruelty. That’s what I did when I made an earlier sarcastic comment.
I remember now. I apologize.
lefty, I think everyone agrees that this is a despicable, depraved animal we’re dealing with here. However, unless we want to be lawless ourselves, we must follow the law. As always, if we don’t like the law, then change it. However, what is the difference at this point between Woodmansee and Bruce Reilly? Do you want to keep Bruce from voting too? Both are murderers who served their time. If the answer is that Woodmansee’s crime was even more disgusting than Reilly’s, then were is the line? Do we want to draw the line at child murderers? If you murder an adult, you can vote when you get out but if you murder a child, you cannot?
Wherever the line is to be drawn, that’s fine, but it needs to be written into the law. If we’re not going to follow the law, then what’s the point of having them?
These sorts of arguments will never go away, and there will always be enough validity to them to keep them, however slightly, in the picture.
That stated, maybe the Left is so poorly motivated to fight because it is benumbed and weakened by too many painful cultural issues. Too many meaningless skirmishes.
Culture lives at the sufferance of power until it reaches a point of consciousness to fight back.
We need lots and lots of people to reach this positive point of consciousness. Do we help to bring that about by depressing the hell out of them?
Take a drive and look around. Spirits are guarded. Spirits are low.
Authoritarians do not respect civil rights. Never did; never will.
Nor do they respect fine distinctions. As for the rest of us, we feel worn out.
Authoritarians have the microphone now–here, there, and everywhere.
What sorts of messages can we send to our own people that will help them to rally and to take heart?
Voting rights for murderers is not a high priority for me right now, but it could be an issue freakish enough to get some schlemiel on the air, making himself and the Left look foolish.
Dan Yorke will bite if there’s a lull in the action. Of that, I’m sure.