Excerpt: Conned

By Sasha Abramsky, AlterNet. Posted April 25, 2006.

A few months before Election 2000, disturbing stories began surfacing in the Florida media about the electoral rolls being "scrubbed," or "purged."

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians were technically not allowed to vote because they had been convicted of a felony at some time in the past; yet the state was worried that several thousand of these men and women (though still less than 10 percent of the state's total number of felons) might have registered to vote anyway and that county officials might have failed to notice that these people were ineligible to vote. And so state officials decided to clean up the rolls.

A private company named Database Technologies, or DBT, was hired by the secretary of state's office to create lists of people thought to have felony records. The secretary of state then sent the lists to county election supervisors and ordered them to remove voters from the rolls if their names showed up on the purge lists. The criteria for potential "matches" of felons' names with the names of people on the electoral rolls were so vague that if only 70 percent of the information overlapped - if a person's name was the same as a felon's nickname or alias, for example - a person would be sent a letter telling them they were being taken off the list of eligible voters because of a prior felony conviction.

As the reports flowed in, it became clear that something had gone very wrong: the vast majority of those being removed from the political process were African American, and a grossly disproportionate number of those removed were likely Democratic voters from Democratic precincts.

Two issues were being played out in Florida 2000. The first was a straightforward, almost technocratic question: were the "right" people ending up on the purge lists, and being removed from electoral rolls, or were these lists being populated by "wrong" names, by people who had never been convicted of felonies? Given the ineptitude of those who had compiled the "purge lists," this problem alone - even though it only dealt with a tiny percentage of the total number of disenfranchised in the state - was of a magnitude large enough to have prevented the Democrats from cleanly winning Florida.

The second issue was more complicated, more philosophical: should "purging" of electoral rolls occur in the first place? Was there a credible intellectual defense of the practice of removing, permanently, the vote from anyone ever convicted of a felony, even if they were living crime-free in the community and paying taxes like everyone else? Most states had, at one time or another, permanently removed at least some categories of felons from their voter rolls; yet, by 2000, the vast majority of states had abandoned these laws, replacing them with temporary bans on voting that generally mirrored the length of a person's prison, parole, or probation sentence. Two states, Maine and Vermont, actually let people vote while in prison - a practice that didn't appear to have much public support in America but which was the law of the land in many other countries, including allies of America such as Israel and post-apartheid South Africa. In Florida, by contrast, most politicians seemed pretty content with keeping the re-enfranchisement bar as high as possible.

Nationally, in the wake of the Florida 2000 debacle, there has been a growing debate within criminal justice circles about whether a felony conviction should, in any way, be linked to the loss of voting rights. There are some who argue that access to the ballot in a democracy is an absolutely inalienable right rather than a privilege, and that a person convicted of a crime should pay a penalty - a fine, community service, or time spent behind bars - but should not be removed from the political process.

There are others who believe that a person who breaks the social contract - in other words, someone who flouts laws agreed upon by the community as a whole - cannot be trusted to participate in the rule-making process; that, in order to preserve the smooth-functioning mechanism of the political system, the rights of at least certain lawbreakers must be forfeit.

It's an argument that has a long pedigree, going back at least as far as seventeenth-century liberal theorists such as British philosopher John Locke. Personally, I think this is a moral gray zone, a place without perfect solutions, a space within which the arguments both in favor of and opposed to removing the vote from those currently serving a sentence have their good points and bad. Were we living in a world lacking all the biases and differences in opportunities that affect the life chances of different individuals and groups, and were all the laws that were used to convict people near universally acknowledged to be fair and just, I would say that temporarily removing the vote as a part of a felon's punishment makes philosophical sense. After all, those who violate fundamental social norms, particularly by wreaking violence on others, have, in a sense, expressed their contempt for the code that binds us together into a community. Thus it doesn't strike me as implausible to say that, for a while, they should not have a say in shaping that community. Opinion polls in America tend to show pretty consistent popular support for such temporary disenfranchisement.

©Sasha Abramsky 2006. This excerpt originally appears as part of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House (The New Press: April 18, 2006). Published with the permission of The New Press.

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