Just a quick though in response to Paul Quinn’s private member’s bill: I know this probably won’t be a very popular opinion but aren’t prisoners the very people we do want voting. After all they probably have good knowledge of the legal system, whether it works and whether it is fair. It seems ridiculous that we wouldn’t want to draw on that experience.
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Totally.
Why follow an american pattern for prisons, where the criminals can’t vote, and the elections are rigged in multifarious ways by people who never seem to get indicted for any of this behaviour…
And once they disenfranchise prisoners, who’s next?
Universal enfranchisement is the effect of the greatest political paradigm shift of the 19/20th centuries (depending on which country you’re a citizen of…), why would we want to go down in history as leading the world in disenfranchisement???