Felons should be allowed to vote, otherwise it would be trivial to lock your opponents out of eligibility through lawfare.

I just realized that this is exactly what the Republican war on drugs was. Not only was it a way to criminalize their political opponents, it was a way of completely politically disenfranchising them. Probably so is a lot of other things in our legal system.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.