Bernie Sanders doubles down on giving felons the right to vote
Sanders says even the Boston bomber should have the right to vote while in prison; reaction from First Step Act beneficiary Matthew Charles.
The first man released from prison under President Trump's criminal justice reform law reacted to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., saying that prisoners should be permitted to vote by noting the "logistical" problems of allowing prisoners serving a sentence to vote and backing prisoners who served their time to have their rights restored.
"I do know while you're incarcerated you do lose some of your liberties. But my thing is, once a person has been completely released and they paid their debt to society and they are back in society actually functioning, paying taxes, then they should have their rights restored to vote," Matthew Charles, who was released from prison under the First Step Act, said on Fox News' "The Story with Martha MacCallum."
"But during the period they're incarcerated, it's going to be like a complex issue because of the logistics. You got people incarcerated in states that they actually are not from."
Sanders opened himself to scrutiny this week after saying that not only should incarcerated prisoners be permitted to vote but that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should also be permitted to vote.
"If somebody commits a serious crime, sexual assault, murder, they will be punished. But I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy. Yes, even for terrible people," Sanders said Monday on a CNN Town Hall.
Trump's re-election campaign called out Sanders Wednesday, describing his idea “deeply offensive.”
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"The extremity and radicalism of the 2020 Democrats knows no bounds,” Trump campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told Fox News.
“Giving imprisoned terrorists, sex offenders, and murderers the right to vote is an outrageous proposal that is deeply offensive to innocent victims across this country, some of whom lost their lives and are forever disenfranchised by the very killers that 2020 Democrats seek to empower," she said.
Fox News' Sally Persons and Alex Pappas contributed to this report.
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