Illinois soldiers wait for ballots, Prisoners get hand delivery of ballots

The Suffering Suffrage of Illinois

By Tim Dunkin
Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Every once in a while, you read something in the news which leaves you seething. We live in a world full of both corruption and stupidity – two things which often seem to work synergistically. A couple of days ago, I came across something which had that unique blend of the two, a news story that was like a freshly-brewed cup of tick-me-off in the morning.

The story in question comes out of Illinois, via Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfide ... -delivery/
Short and to the point, Breitbart’s article notes that election officials in The Most Corrupt County in the Most Corrupt State in the Union ™ are making sure that every last inmate in the Cook County jail receives a ballot so that they can vote in the upcoming election. Shoot, they’re even bringing registration forms along to make sure every murderer, rapist, and child molester in the Cook County prison system is signed up to vote. At the same time, well nigh 35 counties in the state were so slack and lackadaisical that they missed the deadline for mailing out ballots to military personnel from Illinois who are serving overseas, which most likely will result in thousands of our servicemen being unable to participate in this year’s election.

What an inversion! Election officials in Illinois (one guess as to which Party the vast majority of them belong to) are scrupulously ensuring that people who should not even be voting, and wouldn’t be if we had any sort of a logical and moral system in place, get to cast a ballot. Meanwhile, the one group of people who have done more than just about anybody else to earn the privilege of exercising their suffrage are robbed of the chance by political hacks and lazy bureaucrats. And from what I’ve been hearing, Illinois isn’t the only state where this has been happening.

I’ll make no bones about it – people in jail should not be able to vote. In fact, those who have committed felonies should never be able to vote again. Those who have committed crimes against our social order – who have breached our system and thumbed their noses at the rule of law – should not be allowed to participate in elections that will help to determine how that same social order is governed, and what laws are in place to act as rules.

By the same standard, military personnel have more than earned the right to vote. While I certainly wouldn’t advocate the sort of system found in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, I think that any reasonably intelligent person ought to be able to understand that those who put their lives – literally – on the line in the service of our nation are most deserving of having their ability to influence the direction of that nation be preserved.

But then again, the political system that produced Antoin “Fat Tonyâ€