Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an advocate of allowing felons to vote. “Advocate” is a loaded word when referring to a judge, and with good reason. Judges are not supposed to allow their personal preferences influence their interpretation of the law and the facts at issue in a given case. But their really is no other way to describe Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Hayden v. Pataki, a case brought by inmates in New York State under the federal Voting Rights Act.
The inmates were suing the State of New York for the right to vote, alleging New York’s prohibition of felon voting was discriminatory based on race and ethnicity. Sotomayor sided with the inmates in a four-paragraph long opinion, holding that the Voting Rights Act prohibited states from disenfranchising felons because the majority are black, Hispanic, and other minorities.
