Bernie Sanders Endorses Allowing Prisoners to Cast Ballots Behind Bars
Shane Trejo
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The state of Iowa and many other states around the country are grappling with the decision of whether or not to grant voting rights to felons, but 2020 presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to take it a step further and allow prisoners to vote while behind bars.
While meeting at a middle school gym auditorium in Muscatine, IA on Saturday, Sanders was asked whether or not individuals in prison should be allowed to vote. Sanders gave the notion a full-throated endorsement.
“I think that is absolutely the direction we should go,” he said.
Sanders’ liberal state of Vermont is the only state in the nation besides Maine to allow prisoners to vote while they are still incarcerated. As President, he would work to expand those policies to the rest of the nation.
“In my state, what we do is separate. You’re paying a price, you committed a crime, you’re in jail. That’s bad,” he said. “But you’re still living in American society and you have a right to vote. I believe in that, yes, I do.”
While Sanders paints his proposal in terms of fairness and social justice, the more likely reason why he and other liberals would want prisoners, felons, and other law-breakers to vote is because they are known to cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party candidate.
A study conducted in 2002 by researchers Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza discovered that “Democratic candidates would have received about 7 out of every 10 votes cast by the felons and ex-felons in 14 of the last 15 US Senate election years.”
Uggen and Manza also argued that if felons were allowed to vote in Florida, the hotly contested 2000 presidential election would have swung in Democrat Al Gore’s favor.
“Had disenfranchised felons been permitted to vote, we estimate that Gore’s margin of victory in the popular vote would have surpassed 1 million votes,” Uggen and Manza said in their study.
“Regardless of the popular vote, however, one state – Florida – held the balance of power. If disenfranchised felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Democrat Gore would certainly have carried the state, and the election,” they added.
A different academic survey that was published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science showed that felons prefer the Democratic Party by a wide margin.
In New York, 61.5 percent of felons who registered to vote registered as a Democrat while only 9 percent registered Republican. In New Mexico, 51.9 percent of felons registered Democrat versus 10.2 percent that registered as a Republican. The results were the same for North Carolina as well, with 54.6 percent of felons registering Democratic and only 10.2 percent registering as Republican.
While reviewing a May 2005 Public Opinion Strategies survey of 602 adults in Washington State, crime researcher Dr. John Lott noticed the findings showed that felons preferred Democrats. Dr. Lott found that “felons were 36 percent more likely than non-felons, with the same characteristics, to have voted for John Kerry over George W. Bush and 37 percent more likely to be registered Democrats.”
“African-American and Asian felons in Washington reported that they voted exclusively for Kerry,” Dr. Lott said, also noting that additional studies estimated that former President Bill Clinton dominated the felon vote with 86 percent in 1992 and an incredible 93 percent in 1996.
Allowing prisoners to vote in addition to felons will only swing things even further in the direction of the Democrats, who also have progressive globalist financier Soros helping to caravan the next generation of liberal voters up from the third-world across the porous US southern border. Sanders wants to stack the deck electorally to transform America into a fully socialist nation.
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