Felons

The right to vote and to cast a free and secret ballot is supposed to be the cornerstone of democracy. Yet, upwards of 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of a past felony conviction. In fact, felons are the only group who is banned from voting by law. While Maine and Vermont allow all residents to vote, even residents serving time in jail, every other state has enacted laws that ban those serving time from voting. Two states, Virginia and Kentucky, permanently disenfranchise people convicted of felonies even after they have served their time.

The exclusion of lawbreakers from the political process dates back hundreds of years. Colonial law incorporated provisions that restricted or eliminated the rights of felons to vote. However, today's laws that restrict voting rights owe their history to the post-civil war reconstruction era. Southern states in particular worried about the potential effects of the15th amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote. These states enacted a series of "Jim Crow" laws, such as poll taxes and literacy requirements, as a means to disenfranchise voters. Banning people with felony convictions from voting significantly limits the number of African-Americans who can vote. According to the Sentencing Project, "1.4 million African American men, or 13% of black men, is disenfranchised, a rate seven-times the national average."

Over the last few years, advocates of felon voting rights have helped to successfully dismantle some laws, but the fight continues and millions of citizens every election are unable to vote because they have a felony conviction on their record.

To learn more about felon disenfranchisement visit The Sentencing Project.

 

Find the state processes for ex-felon re-enfranchisement This is especially useful if you are an ex-felon, a friend/family member of an ex-felon or are simply curious about the policies and procedures individual states establish.

[ More resources on felon disenfranchisement ]  

Extending Democracy to Ex-Offenders

Published June 22nd 2005 in The New York Times

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.

This distinctly American bias - which extends to jobs, housing and education - keeps even law- abiding ex-offenders confined to the margins of society, where they have a notoriously difficult time building successful lives. A few states, at least, are beginning to grasp this point. Some are reconsidering postprison sanctions, including laws that bar ex-offenders from the polls.

The Nebraska Legislature, for example, recently replaced a lifetime voting ban for convicted felons with a system in which ex-offenders would have their rights automatically returned after a two-year waiting period. Iowa, which also bars former prisoners from voting for life, took a similar step forward last week when Gov. Tom Vilsack announced his intention to sign an executive order that would restore voting rights to felons after they complete their sentence.

Governor Vilsack's decision is particularly important, given that Iowa has some of the most severe postprison sanctions in the country. The other four states with similar laws are in the South, where disenfranchisement was created about a century ago, partly to keep black Americans from exercising their right to vote.

The Iowa and Nebraska cases reflect a growing awareness in some of the states that these laws offend the basic principles of democracy. They also stigmatize millions of Americans, many of whom have paid their debts to society and want nothing more than to rejoin the mainstream. The more the United States embraces this view, the healthier we will be as a nation.