OPINION: When Should Punishment End?

The push to allow felons to vote is more about gaining Democratic voters than rehabilitating people.

Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents Vermont in the Senate, has called for extending voting rights to prisoners currently incarcerated — all of them, he says, meaning: Terry Nichols, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Nidal Hasan, sundry Aryan Brotherhood bosses, a blanket immunity that presumably would have covered the late Charles Manson before he went off to his eternal reward.

As a matter of political calculation, the Democrats probably are less interested in supermax-cloistered terrorists than...