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Comment by akuji1993 | Hacker News Reader

akuji1993

Yep, that's exactly what a private prison system leads to. You can see the system working as intended here. 5 years is... just ridiculous. There's no words for this kind of injustice.

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Private prisons have basically nothing to do with this. They house very little of the prison population (less than 10% IIRC)

Private prisons lead to lobbying for harsher convictions to improve the bottom line of those prisons, that is why they often come up.

So do police and prison guards' unions, and they're much larger: https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or....

Prison guard unions and private prisons are effectively the same thing. They are both groups that directly benefit by increasing the prison population.

>>Private prisons have basically nothing to do with this.

Incorrect. Private prisons have lobbyists that contaminate the system further upstream to ensure a steady supply of inmates. They do this by lobbying legislators for harsher prison sentences on trivial crimes.

While I am completely opposed to the quasi not really private prisons (they should not be called Private, a Private company has competition, these corporations are Government Contractors)

The idea their lobbying efforts have had any effect on punishment guidelines is laughable.

1. The Public in General Votes for "Tough on Crime" politicians, the Public wants "criminal" to pay, they are just to ignorant to understand who "criminals" are as they picture the person is a ski mask robbing and raping them, not some person filling out a government form incorrectly

2. The Police Unions, Guard unions, and various other Non-Profit Groups lobby far far far more effectively than any of the For-profit Government Contractors for very very harsh punishments, and for the creation of new laws and regulations to make even more criminals every year.

I find five years a bit surprising, but what do you think the proper penalty would be for a felon committing voter fraud should be?

Edit: I'm utterly amazed that this comment has been downvoted to silence. Disenfranchising felons — i.e., those who have committed extremely serious crimes — is while somewhat controversial a long-standing practice. The woman in question committed voter fraud by voting without being legally permitted to. This raises some questions. Are felons seriously not told they may not vote? Why not? Is five years a reasonable sentence (I don't really think so in this case, but for someone who commits large-scale voter fraud it might be)? Certainly the woman seems hard-done-by. At the end of the day, though, she did commit a crime under the laws of the state, and while the sentence seems harsh some sentence is necessary.

If you come from a country (like most European countries) where people are allowed to vote both on probation, and also in prison, then the whole act of voting wouldn't even be a fraud in your home country. But different countries have different practices on what is a crime.

You would also be required to present photo ID in order to vote.

I would prefer 0 days in prison because I don't think voting while a felon should be a crime. But, if we still want to call this situation voter fraud, how about we sentence them to community service? This person is not a danger to society, so I see no reason to put them in prison. More prion just messes up their life further and costs everybody a lot of precious tax dollars.

While I agree that what this woman did shouldn't be voter fraud, community service isn't sufficient deterrent for actual voter fraud. People put in lots of volunteer hours to help get their preferred candidate elected, so they'd probably be willing to risk community service too. Voter fraud is very dangerous to society, as society depends on our trust in institutions.

It's not nearly as dangerous as privatised corporate justice, or jailing people for five years for essentially trivial offences.

Those are also things that we as a society should try to prevent.

An isolated case of voter fraud isn't dangerous. The danger is what would happen if fraud became widespread.

What's widespread mean? I bet more people drive drunk than are tempted to vote illegally. The penalty for first time intoxicated driving is often just a fine.

The max jail time in Texas for first time DWI is 180 days (or as little as 3 days).

In-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare (0.0003 percent to 0.0025 percent, according to a recent meta-analysis[1]). A severe penalty in this sort of case serves no meaningful deterrent function.

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud...

Are you saying that the rarity of voter fraud is evidence that current deterrent measures don't work?

I'm saying that rarity of voter fraud means deterrent measures like this are unnecessary. It's a solution in search of a problem.

I agree that we don't need any new measures against voter fraud, but I don't see how it follows that existing voter fraud laws need to be removed or not enforced. Do you have any evidence of what the effect would be if the punishment for voter fraud were community service?

You are begging the question.

She voted in a way that was contrary to the law, but it was (likely) a mistake rather than fraud.

In any case, the penalty should be something like losing the right to vote in a single future election, especially lacking any evidence of an organized scheme to corrupt an election.

I think it's undemocratic to take away felons' right to vote.

How is this voter fraud? The issue is with them not being allowed to vote in the first place.

> How is this voter fraud?

Because she wasn't legally allowed to vote, and she did. That's voter fraud.

I'm fine with forbidding felons to vote, and of course any law forbidding something has to have penalties. I'm very surprised that the penalty in this case was so high and that it appears to have been a strict-liability crime. Honestly, six months or even less for a first offense would seem reasonable to me — but I'm not a judge.

I'm not convinced with the basic premise that a felon shouldn't be able to vote, so why any penalty at all?

It's also believable she didn't know this law existed.

Looking at the statute, it's not illegal unless you know you aren't eligible to vote (Sec. 64.012. ILLEGAL VOTING):

http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/EL/htm/EL.64.htm

Maybe some other law applies?

Amongst all the crazy comments in this thread, this may have been the only one we should all be discussing.

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