Democratic Party Boosted in WA; Jailed Felons can Vote

[Lemur]

our system of justice is based entirely on results and not on motivation. Therefore, we cannot distinguish between robbing because you need to eat and robbing because you want that which you did not earn, because the result is the same:

Um, not really. If this were the case we would not have any distinction between murder 1 and manslaughter. There would be no insanity plea. "Mitigating circumstances" would not exist.

Our system of justice takes motivation into account pretty much every time. Whether or not is has a bearing on the sentence is a matter for the judge and jury. We put human judgment as a buffer between the accused and the law every step of the way, because the law is a blunt instrument.

The majority [of criminals vote Democrat]. That's been independently verified several times. Try Google.

Intrigued, I consulted with the Java Googles, and found that this is largely based on the Florida 2000 election, where several thousand felons attempted to vote (I believe this is another case of lifelong loss of voting privileges for convicts, which I have already said is questionable). 68% of those caught voted for Gore, 32% voted for Bush, which was pretty much in-line with what would be expected from the demographics (heavily minority and low-income). So the moral of the story is that convicts appear to vote exactly the way you would expect them to, based on their demographic and economic status. The fact that they're criminals does not have a measurable impact. Who knew?

-edit-

Note that the reason I'm referring to the Florida 2000 election is that by our system, votes are secret. There is no mechanism for releasing who voted how, and such a release would actually be, you know, illegal. So plenty of people are pushing "estimates" and "analysis" and other good guesses, but the FL2K election is one of the only cases where an actual count was made and released.