Felons: The Latest Democratic Special Interest Group?

Today's NYT contained an editorial advocating that convicted felons be allowed to vote:

The laws that strip ex-offenders of the right to vote across the United States are the shame of the democratic world. Of an estimated five million Americans who were barred from voting in the last presidential election, a majority would have been able to vote if they had been citizens of countries like Britain, France, Germany or Australia. Many nations take the franchise so seriously that they arrange for people to cast ballots while being held in prison. In the United States, by contrast, inmates can vote only in two states, Maine and Vermont.

Call me cynical, but one wonders whether the NYT would be as concerned with the voting rights of felons if it were not widely believed that they skew overwhelmingly Democratic in their political orientation.

Personally, I am not in favor of making it easier for unmotivated, uninformed people to vote. Voting should be a privilege as well as a right. Perhaps, as Robert A. Heinlein argued in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, voting rights should be earned by civic service in the military or other forms of public service. Maybe if convicted felons (not "ex-offenders") were to do something to repay society for their crimes, it might make sense to restore their full rights of citizenship. But allowing them to register to vote as they collect their personal belongings and the bus ticket home at the prison gate? I don't think so.