Former Felons Face Uphill Battle to Regain Voting Rights

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2006 by Gaines, Patrice

Former Felons Face Uphill Battle to Regain Voting Rights The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons by Elizabeth A. Hull (Temple University Press, $19.95 paperback)

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (Oxford University Press, $29.95)

After the infamous 2000 presidential election. ordinary citizens began to pay closer atteniion to the issue of voting rights for felons. The popular vote in Florida was so close the issue landed in the Supreme Court. Then it was discovered that "the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of former offenders in the state of Florida - individuals who have completed their entire sentence-was a critical factor enabling George W. Bush to carry that state and win the 2000 presidential election," as Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen write in the introduction to Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. If those felons could have voted, the outcome of the election may have been different.

In Locked Out, which is packed with interesting, readable research data, and another book. The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons by Elizabeth A. Hull, the authors explain how we came to this place in a time when some people are denied the right to vote based on their criminal record. Both books connect the dots between slavery and early restrictions such as poll taxes and literacy tests that stopped Blacks from voting and current laws that disenfranchise felons, which statistically means again stopping thousands of Blacks from voting.

"The overall size of the disenfranchised felon population has reached 5.3 million people - a potentially significant number of voters in a competitive twoparty system," Manza and Uggen write.

The authors of Locked Out illustrate the broad range of people affected by these disenfranchisement laws by using Pamela Smith, a felon currently in prison for falsifying a drug prescription; and George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, who once lost the right to vote because he was convicted for making an illegal contribution to Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign.

Smith, questioned about her lost right, says, "It's just like a little salt in the wound...Just one little vote, right? But that means a lot to me."

Steinbrennner, whose voting rights were returned when President Reagan pardoned him, says 30 years later: "Maybe people say, Oh, it means nothing. It was a petty felony,' Not me.. .It was very tough for me. I am very patriotic."

After the 2000 elections some pundits thought states would rush to pass voting reforms, but that didn't happen. Still, there has been some "meaningful reform," according to Hull.

One state that has instituted reform is New Mexico, which had, since admission to the Union in 1912, disenfranchised felons for life, making it one of only nine states to do so. In 2001, the state passed legislation to restore the right to vote to felons who have completed their sentences and the terms of their release.

Among the "modest reformers" are Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Delaware, Arkansas and Nevada, which require (some before the 2000 election) "correction officials to provide convicted felons, on a timely basis, with application forms and instructions for reactivating their voting rights."

Manza, a professor of sociology and associate director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, and Uggen, a professor of sociology and McKnight presidential fellow at the University of Minnesota, conducted a stateby-state canvas of clemency procedures, a process they admit was "daunting." They were often transferred from one office to another or "confronted with two official documents that seemed to make contradictory statements about just who is eligible for clemency and what the appropriate procedures are for application." Of course, this means it would likely be even more difficult for ex-felons to navigate their way through the actual process.

The authors' research highlights important information such as the fact that "when African Americans make up a larger proportion of a state's prison population, that state is significantly more likely to adopt or extend felon disenfranchisement." Their findings illustrate that there is a clear relationship between race and laws that take away the right to vote.

"Ex-felons pay taxes, go to work, raise their children and are generally indistinguishable from their fellow citizens in all but one respect: They have no say in the way their communities are governed," Hull writes, noting that more than 4 million Americans were barred from voting in the 2000 presidential election because they were former convicts.

Again, we see the role race has played in shaping voting laws when Hull, an expert on the Fourteenth Amendment and professor of political science at RutgersNewark, lays out the history of disenfranchisement. After the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing "all persons," including newly freed Blacks, the "equal protection of the laws," constitutional conventions in Southern states passed laws criminalizing behavior "blacks were supposedly more likely than whites to commit," Hull notes.