Levi Odell

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

I became a citizen in 2016, and the first time I voted I cried in the parking lot afterward, which embarrassed my husband. In the country where I was born, people my parents' age queued for hours in the heat to vote in the first free election, and some didn't come home. So the American habit of treating the ballot like a coupon you clip if you feel like it has always struck me as strange. People say mandatory voting violates freedom. I think choosing not to vote when the right was handed to you freely is the real waste, but I wouldn't force anyone's conscience either. Let them cast a blank ballot if they want. What I can't accept is a system where the people who most need government to work, the poor, the young, the ones working two jobs, are exactly the people who stay home, and then we call the result the will of the people. It's the will of the people who had time.

Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after serving their sentences?

Maine and Vermont let people vote from prison, and neither state has suffered an election-integrity meltdown. That matters because the strongest argument against restoration is usually a vague fear that voting somehow cheapens punishment, yet the two states that go furthest have the least drama. The [European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2005](https://www.echr.coe.int/) that blanket bans on prisoner voting violate basic rights, and most European democracies allow it with no visible harm to public safety or the seriousness of sentences. We already count incarcerated people in the census for purposes of political representation, so we are happy to use their bodies for apportionment while denying them a voice. Drawing the line at the ballot box is a choice, not a necessity, and the evidence from the states and countries that chose differently is reassuringly boring.