Let them vote

This article was published in The Economist 29 October 2009

Even society’s worst offenders should not lose the vote when they lose their liberty. Most rich democracies spend a lot of time and money trying to convince more people to exercise their right to vote. So it might seem strange that some of the same countries take some trouble preventing thousands of citizens from going to the polls. In 48 American states and seven European countries, including Britain, prisoners are forbidden from voting in elections. Many more countries impose partial voting bans (applying only to prisoners serving long sentences, for instance). And in ten American states some criminals are stripped of the vote for life, even after their release.

There is scant public sympathy for characters such as Peter Chester, a British child-killer whose bid to use human-rights legislation to win the right to vote from his cell was rejected on October 28th.