To the Editor:

I hope all Princetonians and New Jersey residents will join me in voting in the upcoming primary election, June 5.

No matter whom you vote for, please remember that our right to vote is an essential civic and Constitutional responsibility so long as we seek to remain a democratic nation. We know the delusions of the founding fathers: only white men who owned property or paid taxes were permitted to vote. Women had no franchise. Nor did native Americans, male or female. “People of color” (as if “white people” were “white”) were not recognized as persons, simply bodies to be tallied. A major character in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India thinks of “whites” as “pinko-grey.”

We can’t forget that our gradually expanded (conceded?) rights to vote stand in sharpest contrast with the all-but-universal deprivation of voting rights from women and men who are incarcerated. Maine and Vermont are the only states that do not deny voting rights to convicted felons while they are in prison; all other states, including New Jersey, suspend a prisoner’s right to vote until (variously) release from prison or the end of parole. According to Wikipedia, “In the national elections in 2012, the various state felony disenfranchisement laws together blocked an estimated 5.85 million felons from voting, up from 1.2 million in 1976. This comprised 2.5 percent of the potential voters in general.”

We are all obliged to vote now for candidates for Princeton Council who may be duly elected in the November elections. Let’s take to the polling booths not only our knowledge of legal entitlement but our awareness of those whose franchise has been stripped from them: the Constitution proper (with its original amendments) nowhere denies voting rights to citizens convicted of felonies.

Daniel A. Harris

Dodds Lane