Monday, August 18, 2014

Belt on Disabled Veterans and the Right to Vote

Rabia Belt, a Michigan alumna and Ph.D. candidate, and a recent Law Research Fellow at Georgetown Law, has posted Ballots for Bullets? Disabled Veterans and the Right to Vote.  Here is the abstract:
Over 100,000 veterans lived in a government-funded home after the Civil War. Despite sacrificing their bodies for the preservation of the nation, these veterans lost the right to vote. This disfranchisement challenges the conventional wisdom that disabled veterans occupied a privileged position in society, politics, and law. Instead, their disability status trumped their military history, and they became part of a set of dependent, disabled people rendered placeless and vote-less by state law.