Convicts Right to Vote
Former Florida Felons Impact on the Next Election
Recent changes in felon disenfranchisement laws in Florida may have an impact on the next election.
Florida has been a key battleground in the last two presidential elections. With candidates winning by razor-thin margins, even a small change in the number of eligible voters could be the determining factor in 2008.
Convicts Right to Vote Nationwide
According to the U.S. Department of Justice Prison and Jail Inmates Report at Midyear 2006, the U.S. prison population is estimated to be approximately 2,245,189. Only two states allow prisoners to vote. Most states also prohibit voting by people on parole or probation. Eleven states, like Florida, either permanently disenfranchise felons or require them to go through a laborious, complicated, and daunting process to get their voting rights back.
Disenfranchised Convicts in Florida
Florida, a state that showed one of the largest increases in prison population in 2006, has a large number of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. According to The Sentencing Project, Florida has well over a million disenfranchised voters.
Many of the people removed from the Florida voter rolls in the last two elections were removed because they were former felons. Some were erroneously removed because they happened to share the same name with a former felon. Others were removed because they had a felony conviction in another state, even when that state automatically reinstated their voting rights.
Florida, which has to respect other state laws, including those related to voting rights, was violating the law when it denied those people their rights. And, according to The Nation, the state also violated two court orders expressly directing the Florida secretary of state and the governor to respect the voting rights of those people.
The Fairness of Disenfranchisement Laws
Voting rights and civil rights activists have long charged that felon disenfranchisement laws unfairly punish people who have already served their sentence and have been purposefully used to prevent minorities from voting in elections.
According to The Sentencing Project, about 5.3 million Americans have lost their right to vote, many permanently. Black men are far more likely to lose their right to vote. The rate of disenfranchisement among African American men is seven times the national average.
The Racist History of Felon Disenfranchisement Laws
Many groups fighting for civil and human rights believe that the disproportionate impact of these laws on African Americans is intentional, a legacy of post-reconstruction-era policies designed to deny blacks their rights.
A joint report written by the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch states, “Southern opposition to black suffrage led to the decision to use numerous ostensibly race-neutral voting barriers - e.g., literacy and property tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and criminal disenfranchisement provisions - with the explicit intent of keeping as many blacks as possible from being able to vote.”
Republicans and Disenfranchisement
Because African Americans tend to vote for democrats, many believe that the pre-election voter purges, performed by the republican secretary of state and governor, intentionally went after felons in order to swing the last elections in Bush’s favor.
Which is why it came as a shock to some when in April of this year the new republican governor, Charlie Crist, revised the felon disenfranchisement laws in Florida in order to make it easier for felons to get their voting rights back.
As of June 2007, according to The Sentencing Project, over 15,000 people had their voting rights reinstated as a result of the new Florida law. While that is only a tiny portion of the disenfranchised in Florida, this small amount of voters could have a large impact on the next election.
Sources
Fellner, Jamie and Marc Mauer. “Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States.” Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project, 1998.
Palast, Gregory. “Florida’s ‘Disappeared Voters’: Disfranchised by the GOP.” The Nation, 2001.
