Summary
Missouri state Representative Michael Davis has introduced the “Donald J. Trump Election Qualification Act,” a bill allowing individuals convicted of felonies to run for public office if otherwise qualified.
The legislation, named after Donald Trump, seeks to repeal a 2015 state law barring felons from candidacy in local or statewide elections.
Davis argues the law should align with Trump’s election as president despite his 34 felony convictions in New York.
He advocates for reintegration of felons into society, emphasizing their rights as citizens to participate in government and elections.
If they can run for office, then they can vote.
IMHO all citizens, in or out of jail should be able to vote. If one is a citizen, one should be automatically registered to vote at 18 yo.
i’d go as far as voting at 16, since that’s the age at which you can pay income tax
Wait, you don’t pay income tax under 16?
I think you mostly can’t work under 16.
14 in the US, sorry I wasn’t thinking outside of my home country
IMHO so should residents.
If you live here, you’re affected by politics, so you should get a say.several states stripped non citizen residents of their local election voting rights this past election. i find it frankly disturbing
Disturbing that you have to be a citizen to vote? I thought that was a given.
Yes, I am aware that there are a few municipalities out there that allow non citizens to vote, and I’m not necessarily opposed to that, but I do find it strange.
I certainly wouln’t move to another country and expect to be allowed to vote without being a citizen!
it’s very common in Europe. Not for national elections, but for local elections so that residents have a say in their schools, roads, etc.
It could be argued that it’s stranger for someone in Arizona to vote for Donald Trump and take away train funding in NYC, than for a Canadian citizen to vote for train funding in their own city in the US.
it’s disturbing that these were people we enfranchised to vote in elections that directly effected them based on their resident status and contributions to local taxes. it’s disturbing that people actively voted to disenfrachise their neighbors, treat members of their community as if they were hostile agents illgally voting in elections they weren’t voting in. it’s disturbing how easy it was for people to frame it like it was weird for non-citizen residents to vote in local elections because in national elections you need to be a citizen when for literal millennia people have had voices in their local communities and this is actually some 20th/21st century bullshit people are pushing that residency has never been a factor in community decision making.
If you weren’t aware, there is a reason that politicians lobby to have big prisons put in their state/district: The census counts the inmates as citizens of the district to be included when making decisions about appropriating funds, but (in most states) they do not get a vote.
So you ostensibly get thousands of people who count toward your population for appropriations purposes, but you don’t need to even bother trying to woo as voters.
100%
Felons actually can vote in Missouri if they’ve completed their sentence. This includes parole and probation terms.
Permanent disenfranchisement is actually less common than people think. It’s still too common by far, and we need to revisit the reasoning for disenfranchisement while incarcerated or on probation, but in most of the country a felony doesn’t prevent voting permanently.
Trump didn’t complete his sentence
I’m not super interested in defending trump or Missouri, but he was neither sentenced in general nor convicted of a felony, or running for office, in Missouri.
So other than the name and inspiration, none of this even applies to him.
I was just pointing out that in Missouri, felons aren’t completely disenfranchised. Yay marginally better civil rights than a lot of people assumed!
Are you saying Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in Missouri?
He was indeed not running for a state or local office in Missouri.
“A lot of people don’t don’t think about the fact that Donald Trump, if he met all the other requirements, if he was a Missouri resident, could not run for state representative or state Senate,” Davis told the Missouri Independent.
“He would be precluded from running for these offices but was able to be re-elected president of the United States. So I think that at least causes people to start thinking about the issue a little more than they might otherwise,” Davis added.
The law in question did not apply to him, and the bill was just named referencing him.
The entire thing is moot. All I was saying is that Missouri doesn’t permanently disenfranchise felons, and the law being discussed didn’t apply to trump for a variety of reasons.
“I believe that we should punish those who do wrong, but once they’ve completed the terms of their sentence, we should allow individuals to reintegrate into society,” Davis told Fox2Now.
Better headline would be this Republican Representative low key just said Trump should be in jail.
Wait a minute, if that 2015 law stands, how come Trump was on the presidential ballot in MO? He is a convicted felon.
I mean, the constitution clearly excludes Trump from being president due to his insurrection coup. But the Supreme Court is a bunch of hacks and laws don’t matter.
Things that make one go “hmm?”
It applied to local and state offices but apparently not federal.
Nope, that’s not it:
No person shall qualify as a candidate for elective public office in the state of Missouri who has been found guilty of or pled guilty to a felony under the federal laws of the United States of America or to a felony under the laws of this state or an offense committed in another state that would be considered a felony in this state.
https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=115.306&bid=34682
“Candidate for elective public office in the state of Missouri” could be read either as can’t be a candidate on the ballot in Missouri or can’t be a candidate for a state position. It depends on if it means [candidate for public office] in Missouri or candidate for [public office in Missouri].
I don’t like how laws are always written very formally like that, I feel like English (or any language tbh) is able to be misinterpreted easily enough as is, and the stilted way it’s used in legal speak just leads to questions and misunderstandings like this. I’d much rather they be written as plainly as is possible and in ways that attempted to remove ambiguity instead of add it, though a lot of the time that’s the point I imagine lol.
You do realize that it is in legal speak for the exact reason you’re saying that it shouldn’t be, right? There are people who study law their entire lives, and it’s literally their job to argue about how these words are interpreted. They’re not for you and I to easily parse. If they were, they’d be way more broken and filled with even more stupid loopholes.
Almost as if this is something that we’ve honed over thousands of years of experience with human behavior and not just completely arbitrary.
With regards to the words “in the state of missouri” they likely conveniently interpretted it as running for an elected office that directly oversees missouri such as sherrifs, judges, state senators etc rather than a position that isnt within the jurisdiction of the state.
Trump was charged under New York law so it didn’t really apply to him (in Misery)
… or an offense committed in another state that would be considered a felony in this state.
Are Trumps New York felonies Missouri Felonies?
I’d bet nobody ever bothered checking.
Wealthy landowners with practical impunity wrote that to stop vagabonds from challenging their power
“I believe that we should punish those who do wrong, but once they’ve completed the terms of their sentence, we should allow individuals to reintegrate into society,” Davis told Fox2Now.
So not at all like Trump.
Luigi 2028
He won’t be old enough, but that would be fucking incredible if he ran.
Apparently all you need to do to evade prison is make an earnest run at being President. Let’s make a Super PAC and get the ball rolling, we’ve got a real American patriot to save.
Are we following rules now? Let me get the word out
I will riot if he runs for anyone other than the Green party.
On the one hand I am absolutely for the abolishment of many felonies. And reintegration and Felons into society. But on the other hand f*** Donald Trump why can’t Missouri do anything actually clearly good and not name s*** after unrepentant fascists.
FWIW we in this shithole of a state have little to no power even if we vote for things. We vote down every “Right to Work” amendment they’ve shoved on the ballot for decades and it just keeps popping back up.
We passed expansion of Medicaid and they simply did nothing to expand it.
We’re all waiting for how they shut down the abortion access amendment that just passed in November.
They force state control of police in the big cities to oppress the brown and black people. They gerrymander the districts. They make voting extremely difficult. They brutalize peaceful protests. Call the national guard in for a mouse fart in the wrong zip code.
It is a fascist dictatorship.
But please, everyone, stop thinking that we here endorse this ferkakte theocracy. We are fighting. We always have. The boot has been systemically on our throats for decades.
It is hard to leave too. The cost of living is so low here that it makes it difficult to even move across the river into Illinois. It is a trap. A trap most of us are born into.
As a resident I agree 100%. There’s just too much lead poisoning state for things to get better any time soon. 🤐
You gotta admit it’s pretty funny though.
white Felons, I assume.
Trump is soooo inspirational! You can be a pedo a rapist a fraud and still become president of the United States!
All of a sudden they care about felons when their God king became one lmao
If the United States was a family, Missouri would be the creepy bachelor uncle who drives a pickup with flags, won’t set foot out of the house without a gun and has a computer with a Don’t Tread on Me wallpaper and a D drive full of bondage porn.
D, E, and F drives. Not RAIDed, of course. Being raided is for the illegals, according to him.
I double checked just for maximum hypocrisy but MO apparently isn’t one of the permanent felon disenfranchisement states - so once time/probation is served convicted felons regain their voting rights.
That makes me throw up slightly less, I guess.
“party of law and order”
Damn it really is a cult.
Being right for all the wrong reasons.
Oh now that it’s a rich white man they’re going to get rid of the laws meant to disenfranchise black communities?
