The lifelong ban does seem arbitrarily harsh and engineered for abuse (anybody subject to taxation should retain voting rights); who benefits from this and how? (It's been 20+ years since my last civics class.)

Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district. Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?

Or is it just a way to suppress voting by as much of the Left as possible?

The Right are the ones who define all these laws. The Left are the ones who seem positioned to run afoul of them (pro-drugs, pro-abortion, pro-prostitution, etc.), then lose their ability to influence change.

> Racism was the historic angle-- but even if you target a black community and make felons of all the men, they would only comprise a minority of voters in a white district, and it just reduces the number of all eligible voters in an all-black district.

Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise, and mass criminalization plus felon disenfranchisement is its direct replacement.

Also, you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.

> Is this a local politics thing (school funding, etc.)?

That, too, but its largely a federal politics thing.

> Reducing the number of voters by eliminating a disfavored class from representation while retaining the political power of apportionment that counts the disebfranchised citizens was the whole point of the 3/5 compromise

Thanks-- I [think I] see where you're going but still don't get where this ends. You have a district with a minority of people who can't vote. Yet they are counted among the population.

This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?

> you maybe want to consider the effect on a mixed-race district where, say, a sufficient minority of whites are sympathetic to black interests that together they would, before selective disenfrnachisement, constitute a majority.

The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?

> This directly suppresses presidential votes, but what besides the House benefits from an inflated population of non-voters?

Presidential voting power (for the same reason as the House; well, really, as a direct consequence of apportionment of the House).

In the 2020 election in Georgia, 49.24% voted for one party and 49.49% voted for the other. The "blue droplets in a red ocean" is very obvious: the ocean has very few people.

> The thought crossed my mind, but the only example I'm familiar with is Atlanta-- a few blue droplets on a red ocean, yet the state is currently represented by two Democratic senators, and the House is split. There's something weird about this but I'm not a political strategist enough to understand what's going on here. Is this where population matters-- density of the metro area outweighing the rest of the state?

Yes, Atlanta metro is about 60% of the population of the state of Georgia.