Over six million people in the United States with past criminal convictions cannot vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. These laws take away a person’s right to vote if they are convicted of a felony offense. As a result of racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system, these laws have a disproportionate effect on blacks and Latinos.
Because of racial discrimination, a minority person is more likely to be convicted of a felony than a white person who committed the same crime. For example, whites are over 50 percent of all crack cocaine users compared to blacks who are around 35 percent of all crack cocaine users. Yet, blacks are over 80 percent of all individuals incarcerated because of illegal drug offenses.As a result of this biased operation of the criminal justice system, over two million African Americans have lost an important civil right—the right to vote.
Disenfranchisement policies likely affected the results of seven U.S. Senate races from 1970 to 1998 as well as the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election. In Florida, nearly 500,000 African Americans are disenfranchised, which obviously had some effect on the election last fall as Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was 113,000.
If only 35 percent of these persons could have voted and they voted for Hillary Clinton at the average rate of all other African Americans (88%), Florida would have gone to Clinton. With Florida, Clinton would have had 261 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. Such calculations would have closed the vote gap in total votes but not enough to put Clinton over the 270 electoral vote total; however, it would have helped considerably if not for the other voter suppression methods used by Republicans.
Republicans have developed a fraudulent way to expand the number of disenfranchised voters at election time. Here is the way Ari Berman of Rolling Stone characterized the process in Florida during the 2000 election:
“A Republican governor in a crucial battleground state instructs his secretary of state to purge the voting rolls of hundreds of thousands of allegedly ineligible voters. The move disenfranchises thousands of legally registered voters, who happen to be overwhelmingly black Hispanic Democrats. The number of voters prevented from casting a ballot exceeds the margin of victory in the razor-thin election, which ends up determining the next President of the United states.”
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters—a number 22 times larger than George W. Bush’s 537 vote margin over Al Gore—were wrongly identified as convicted felons and were eliminated from the rolls of voters in Florida. African Americans, who favored Gore at 86 percent, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s voters but 41 percent of those purged from voting rolls.
Voter disenfranchisement is an issue of partisan politics—Republicans push for these laws and Democrats tend to push against them. Four states—Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia–take voting rights away from felons forever; however, in recent years Democratic governors in each of these states have revised the system to more readily grant voting rights to ex-felons only to see it reversed by Republicans. In Iowa, Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa re-enfranchised all state residents who had completed their sentences by executive order on July 4, 2005. That order was then reversed by his successor, Governor Terry Branstad, in January 2011.
In 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, then a Republican but later a Democrat, instituted automatic vote restoration to felons who have completed their full sentences. But In March of 2011 Florida, under Republican Governor Rick Scott, Florida rescinded automatic voting restoration for convicted felons.
In November of 2015, toward the end of his term, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky issued an executive order that restored voting rights to all ex-felons who had completed their sentences and were disenfranchised because of non-violent convictions. But this rights restoration was short-lived as the new Governor, Republican Matt Bevin, issued a new executive order barring all persons with past felony convictions from voting unless the governor restores the right to vote.
In April of 2016 Democratic Governor, Terry McAuliffe of Virginia issued an executive order restoring voting rights to all convicted felons. Three months later the Virginia Supreme Court ruled McAuliffe’s executive order unconstitutional as he had overstepped his authority.
Felony disenfranchisement laws are racist in both their intentions and their effects. While they may not have thrown the election to Donald Trump, it is clear that they helped. The bottom line seems to be this. Those of us who can vote must do so if for no other reason than electing officials who will reverse these voter suppression laws.