Convicted felons who want to have their voting rights restored after leaving
prison are encountering problems with election officials who don't always
interpret requirements correctly, political scientists and prisoner advocates
say.
Roadblocks have cropped up most recently in Ohio, Florida and New York state.
They result, at least in part, from confusion among election officials over
varying state laws and revisions in some of those laws in recent years, said
Michael Margolis, a University of Cincinnati political science professor.
"But they're supposed to know the law," he said.
Prisoner advocates have accused Ohio election officials of giving wrong
information to released felons seeking to have their voting rights restored. The
advocates sued this week, asking a federal judge to compel Ohio's secretary of
state and county boards of election to fix the problem before the Oct. 4
deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 2 presidential election.
If successful, the lawsuit could add thousands of voters in a state already
considered a battleground between President Bush and Democrat John Kerry. The
lawsuit seeks to represent 7,000 to 21,000 released felons.
For felons already trying to re-enter society under the stigma of being
convicts, confusion about whether they are allowed to vote again can impede
their efforts to become productive citizens, said Robin Templeton, director of
the Right to Vote Campaign. The New York-based civil rights coalition focuses on
helping felons regain their voting rights.
"It's not about partisanship and one party or the other trying to get
people to vote a certain way," Templeton said. "It's really about
democracy and the law being implemented."
States have authority to set qualifications for voters. In their 2002 book,
"American Elections: The Rules Matter," political scientists Robert
Dudley and Alan Gitelson outlined the contrast in state laws regarding felons
and their right to vote.
Fourteen states permanently forbid convicted felons to vote. Thirty-two
states prohibit offenders from voting while they remain on parole.
Ohio law requires county elections boards to cancel the voting registration
of people convicted of felonies. But another state law says the voting rights
must be restored once felons are released from prison, even if they are still on
parole or probation.
Despite that, 21 of Ohio's 88 elections boards gave wrong information to
testers posing as felons who asked how to register to vote, said David
Singleton, a lawyer with the Prison Reform Advocacy Center. Singleton filed the
lawsuit Tuesday against Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and county
boards of election statewide.
Some boards incorrectly said felons couldn't vote until after they had
completed parole, while others said the felons would have to provide
documentation to prove they had been released, even though Ohio's law doesn't
require that, Singleton said.
Blackwell, Ohio's chief elections officer, says he has been informing
election boards about the law on restoring voter rights since it took effect in
1996. He also distributed copies of the Prison Reform Advocacy Center report on
the test results to all election boards with a reminder of what state law
requires, spokesman Carlo LoParo said.
"We take this very seriously," LoParo said.
State officials are discussing possible short- and long-term solutions,
including offering voter registration services in parole offices and having
elections board employees use the state prison system's Web site to confirm
whether inmates have been released.
A survey two years ago of county elections boards in New York state found
problems similar to Ohio's with elections officials asking felons for
documentation that wasn't required or that, in some cases, did not exist, said
Jessie Allen, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice of the New York
University School of Law. Allen supervised two law students who did the survey.
Lee Daghlian, spokesman for the New York State Board of Elections, agreed on
Thursday that the documentation request caused problems because various counties
handled the situation differently and the requested paperwork wasn't always
available.
The problem seems to have been resolved during the past year, though, because
New York's boards of election are now using the state prison system's Web site
to verify whether prisoners have completed their sentences and probation terms,
Daghlian said. New York law requires that felons complete probation before they
are allowed to vote, he said.
Daghlian said his state's election officials worked with Allen's group on
solving the problem.
Allen is lead counsel in a court fight with Florida over restoring voting
rights to felons. As a result of that dispute, Florida's top elections official
ordered a review in July of the state's voter database after a list used by
county officials to remove thousands of felons from voting rolls was found to
contain mistakes. It listed thousands of people who are eligible to vote,
Florida officials said.