A narrative originally appearing in the Associated Press (“AP”) complaining about the lack of felon voting rights in Mississippi is being amplified by quite a lot of different information retailers.
The story is the product of a left-wing need to normalize the trouble to present voting rights to convicted felons.
The reasoning is straightforward: felons vote for Democrats, in keeping with a research from the left-wing Brennan Middle for Justice at NYU regulation. The findings have been that 70% registered as Democrats and 24% registered as Republicans. Different research present someplace between a 20-40% choice for Democrats by these with a previous felony conviction.
The story quotes Kenneth Almons who served 23 years in state jail for armed theft. It mentions that armed theft is one in all Almons’ felonies, it doesn’t listing out what his different fees placing him behind bars have been.
The story does point out that Mississippi solely restricts voting rights for folks convicted of a sure listing of twenty-two completely different felonies. It doesn’t listing out what these different felonies are, however here’s the list from the Attorney General’s website.
Felons lose their obligation to serve on jury duty when called in every state except Maine. Felons lose their gun rights beneath federal regulation in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), federal firearms rights are misplaced upon conviction of a “crime punishable by a imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.”
CNN in 2020 estimated that 5 million people with felony convictions are not currently voting.
The big variety of far-left teams advocating for the restoration of voting rights don’t appear as involved with the restoration of jury responsibility obligations, although juries are chronically undermanned nationwide, nor the restoration of firearm possession rights.
Listed below are the far-left teams concerned on this advocacy:
The Related Press doesn’t establish a single opponent of the invoice, and doesn’t deal with any attainable negatives to the proposed laws. In reality, the information piece quotes a far-left group, the Brennan Middle.
Beforehand, the AP editorialized and said that the restoration of felon voting rights was ‘bipartisan’ and offered a ‘rare’ chance for change. The improper advocacy by the information outlet is matched by the unbalanced protection throughout the story, the place just one facet of the argument and debate is being offered. The apparent partisan implications of the invoice are additionally ignored, to the good thing about the occasion that may need to cover its electoral agenda and technique.
This sort of advocacy throughout the information, together with the corruption of the mainstream media that presents far-left coverage agenda objects as ‘bipartisan’ efforts, is a part of a 50-plus yr center-right criticism of systemic bias within the media that promotes senseless conformity to left-wing ideology.
A easy search of Google reveals the headline of the article is repeated exactly the same in 40 different news outlets. It’s an in depth model of this formulation:
headline: Mississippi legislators received’t clean the trail this yr to revive voting rights after some felonies
These retailers are merely repeating the wire service copy, copying-and-pasting the headline and the textual content of the story as given to them.
The reporter on the Related Press who wrote the unique story was Emily Wagster Pettus. In her article, Pettus writes from a wholly left-wing sympathetic standpoint. Her article toes a hard-left political line. Pettus claims in her article, citing to the attorneys within the case from left-wing teams, that blacks usually tend to commit felonies, particularly the felonies listed above, than different races.
She refers back to the prohibition on felon voting as coming from a “Jim Crow era” of the state’s historical past. Reporter Pettus makes an argument for guilt-by-timeline and guilt-by-association because the legal guidelines in query have been handed on the fallacious time and within the fallacious place to be thought-about legitimate.
This even if many different states, together with many different southern states, enable for felon voting rights restoration. To not point out that many different states with comparable guidelines, Iowa, Connecticut, Wyoming, Arizona, by no means had ‘Jim Crow’ legal guidelines nor have been they within the Confederacy. 
The start of Pettus’ original story reads as follows:
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Kenneth Almons says he started a 23-year sentence in a Mississippi jail simply two weeks after graduating from highschool, and one in all his felony convictions — for armed theft — stripped away voting rights that he nonetheless has not regained many years later.
Now 51, Almons informed lawmakers Wednesday that he has labored arduous and remained law-abiding since his launch, and he needs to have the ability to vote.
“It would mean I am no longer considered a nobody,” Almons mentioned. “Because when you don’t have a voice, you’re nobody.”
Mississippi is among the many 26 states that take away voting rights from folks for legal convictions, in keeping with the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mississippi’s unique listing of disenfranchising crimes springs from the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who’ve sued to problem the listing say authors of the state structure eliminated voting rights for crimes they thought Black folks have been extra prone to commit.
The restoration of felon voting rights, letting the votes of rapists to cancel out their victims, and for murderers to double-outvote their victims, has opponents that the Related Press may discover if that they had tried.
