Ex-Felons Fight To Regain Political Voice

Since the 2000 election debacle, an increasing number of politicians and activists have been fighting to end the legally sanctioned disenfranchisement of somewhere in the region of five million Americans. The disenfranchised are men and women impacted by a variety of state laws banning those with felony convictions from casting ballots at elections. After years without a political voice, these individuals are now at the forefront of a growing battle, coordinated by the New York-based Right to Vote Campaign, framed by the emotive language of civil rights.

Twelve years ago, Yvonne Kennedy, a Democratic member of Alabama's House of Representatives began a campaign to re-enfranchise ex-prisoners in the state after they had served out their sentences. At the time, Kennedy's crusade appeared little short of quixotic; in an era where politicians were made and broken according to their tough-on-crime credentials, who in their right mind would waste political capital arguing that ex-cons should have the right to vote?

By last year, however, three years after felon disenfranchisement in Florida had, at least in part, determined the outcome of the 2000 election, and with presidential wannabes jockeying for position before the start of the Democratic primaries, re-enfranchisement had become a hot-button political issue across the country. "The campaign," says Robin Templeton, national director of the Right to Vote Campaign, "has to do to felon disfranchisement what civil rights did to poll taxes and literacy tests. It's about the legacy of Jim Crow persisting today."

In their annual conference in San Francisco, the American Bar Association came out against the disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners. In July, at the NAACP convention in Miami, six of the original crop of Democratic hopefuls for the presidential nomination came out in favor of restoring the vote to felons after the completion of their sentences. In Florida, lawyers are fighting a major lawsuit against disenfranchisement codes, and, in two separate cases, the state agreed to re-enfranchise many tens of thousands of individuals, while leaving hundreds of thousands of others still voteless. In Wyoming and Nevada, the legislatures have passed partial re-enfranchisement, allowing non-violent first time felons to regain their vote after completion of their sentence.

Elsewhere, over the past couple years, Delaware has abandoned permanent disenfranchisement; Connecticut has moved to restore the vote to parolees; an appeals court in Washington state overturned a lower court ruling dismissing a challenge to that state's disenfranchisement provisions; and New Jersey and Minnesota are debating whether to restore the vote to those on parole and probation. Yet several other states have rebuffed re-enfranchisement efforts and are continuing to bar people with felony convictions from electoral participation.

"There's been a remarkable shift away from permanent disenfranchisement in a number of states," says attorney Jessie Allen, of the New York-based Brennan Center for Social Justice. Allen is currently lead attorney in a lawsuit alleging that Florida's disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act because of their disproportionate impact on minority populations. "The ones where it's left are almost all old Confederacy states -- and I don't think that's accidental."

Perhaps nowhere has the debate been fiercer than in Alabama, one of only 13 states going into the 2000 election to still have on the books a permanent disenfranchisement statute effecting individuals ever convicted of a felony; and one of only six states not to have enacted some modifying legislation since that date.

By last summer the legislative Black Caucus was firmly in favor of re-enfranchisement, as were a large number of white Democratic politicians. Their reasoning was simple: the pols had realized that in an era of mass incarceration, disfranchisement laws relating to those convicted of felonies were hugely impacting the political process, and removing large numbers of low-income and minority voters (people demographically likely to vote Democrat) from the electoral rolls.