Regardless of whether or not you think incarceration of minorities is systemized disenfranchisement, I think any loophole that hypothetically allows the system to chose who may vote is a bigger threat to democracy than an incentive to appeal to criminals.
Totally agree with your point that incentivizing "pandering to criminals" can be a bad thing though, just the lesser of the two imo.
Disproportionate to what? Their share of the population, or their share of homicides committed? (Using homicide because, unlike other crimes, it's hard to bias the numbers by over-policing. You'll catch more jay-walkers if you assign more police to an area, but you'll get roughly the same number of dead bodies.)
> Totally agree with your point that incentivizing "pandering to criminals" can be a bad thing though
If so many people are considered criminals that pandering to them is required to win elections, then perhaps it's the legal system that's in the wrong.
They are overwhelmingly felons. The disenfranchisement rate is highest among blacks at 7.8%, so 92.2% of blacks, so the overwhelming majority, is not affected by this at all. What makes you think the majority of blacks would welcome the enfranchisement of criminals that happen to share their skin color? After all, the victims of these criminals are overwhelmingly black themselves.
Also, black voter turnout has been consistently 5-10% lower than white voter turnout except for the election of Barack Obama, where it was the opposite. That means the impact of felony disenfranchisement at most is about as high as non-participation has been in the past.
> Regardless of whether or not you think incarceration of minorities is systemized disenfranchisement...
Indeed I don't think so.
>... I think any loophole that hypothetically allows the system to chose who may vote is a bigger threat to democracy than an incentive to appeal to criminals.
I don't consider it a loophole, becoming a felon is a fairly high bar to getting disenfranchised and the constitution sets some boundaries as to what can be considered a felony. If anything, I would argue that locking someone up for years for selling an ounce of weed is unconstitutional.
Let's think of options to increase election win probabilities for party A.
One option: legislate laws and bring about a justice system in which that group of people are disproportionately imprisoned/fined/etc and made to lose voting rights.
Unsurprising result: party A has higher chance of winning elections.
Problem: current system incentivizes politicians in party A to enact this option.
How to stop this option: give voting rights to everyone including felons.
As a black person who has been stopped more often than my white peers because I look like an immigrant (in Europe though), systemic racism is just marketing, there's no systemic racism enshrined in law in any Western society.
Sure, some individual may be racist, even if it's hard to say whether someone is racist or he's just afraid of the statistics, which prove some groups indeed harm police officers and other citizens in disproportionately high numbers.
Things would be definitely better for everyone (minus the cartels, I guess) if it wasn't for the war on drugs, which makes poor people into criminals. And things would be much better if some groups weren't specifically targeted in the 60s and given benefits that incentivised fatherlessness and broke the family structure. It's a huge topic, so you can look up Thomas Sowell on this.