Jailhouse vote: President Gore?

This touches on several interesting areas. First, the question of whether felons should be allowed to vote; frankly, I see very little about being a felon that necessarily removes your right to political representation permanently. Felons certainly have a self-interested position with respect to criminal law, but that is not necessarily wrong; governments are quite capable of abusing criminal law to restrict the number of voters or to exclude those unlikely to support the present government from the process at all. At present, according to this survey, more than 2% of the potential voters are felons and thus barred; that seems clearly excessive. So, I don't see anything wrong with felons voting in the long run; whether they can vote while incarcerated is a different question.

Second, would it have changed the election? Apparantly so, but it was a remarkably close election. Since my vague knowledge of this issue suggests to me that most felons are racial minorities convicted of drug offenses, should we assume that felons would have voted for Gore because they are a minority (traditionally voting heavily democratic), because they believe Democrats are softer on drug issues, or because of some other factor?