Voting Rights in the US are a patchwork of federal and state laws, and nothing more clearly demonstrates this than the laws surrounding the voting rights of felons and ex-felons. Unfortunately, people of colour are disproportionately affected.
Alabama Democrat Doug Jones was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by a mere 21,000 votes. That margin would have been much larger if Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a strident partisan Republican, would have taken steps to inform his state’s voters than thousands of ex-felons were eligible to vote under a 2017 state law. But Merrill didn’t do that, …
6. I’m here to talk about Alabama’s outrageous locking out of people with convictions (disproportionately people of color) from the electoral franchise.
7. Hundreds of thousands of people in Alabama either couldn’t vote yesterday in the #ALSEN election or thought they couldn’t vote bc of AL SOS’s failure to communicate the law.
8. Here’s a long but important timeline. In 1901, #alabama created a criminal disenfranchisement law designed to disenfranchise blacks. They said as much right in the record.
9. They chose to disenfranchise ppl with crimes “involving moral turpitude” b/c that standard was mushy enough to let their friends vote while disenfranchising blacks for violations of the “black code” crimes they made up.
10. In 1985, the Supreme Court struck down the moral turpitude phrase as racially discriminatory because duh. But in 1996, the #AL legislature put the “moral turpitude” standard BACK INTO THE LAW.
11. From 1996 to 2017, there was absolutely NO standard for what convictions were disqualifying. There was no set list of crimes that “involved moral turpitude” and individual registrars county to county decided who got to vote. Many treated ALL felonies as disqualifying.
12. Remember how the standard was chosen in the first place because it could be applied to hurt minorities? (And by the way, Alabama is one of only 12 states that still permanently disenfranchises anyone after their convictions are complete and their time is served.)
13. Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly support letting people vote after they have completed their sentences (although apparently #RoyMoore does not.)
Fifteen percent of black residents in the state have been kept away from the polls because of their criminal records, according to the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a lawsuit last year arguing the state’s moral turpitude rule was discriminatory. “Felony disenfranchisement laws have the undeniable effect of diminishing the political power of minority communities,” said Danielle Lang, an attorney for the center. Indeed, at the time of the state’s constitutional convention, the president of the convention said the rule was intended to “establish white supremacy” in the state. (emphasis added) …More than 7 percent of the adult African American population couldn’t vote, compared with 1.8 percent of other Americans.
Alabama is one of 12 states that permanently disenfranchises some or all people who have ever been convicted of felonies.
From Wikipedia:
Other than Maine and Vermont, all U.S. states prohibit felons from voting while they are in prison.[41] In Puerto Rico, felons in prison are allowed to vote in elections.
Practices in the United States are in contrast to some European nations, such as Norway. Some nations[42] allow prisoners to vote. Prisoners have been allowed to vote in Canada since 2002.[43]
The United States has a higher proportion of its population in prison than any other Western nation,[44] and more than Russia or China.[45] The dramatic rise in the rate of incarceration in the United States, a 500% increase from the 1970s to the 1990s,[46] has vastly increased the number of people disenfranchised because of the felon provisions. (emphasis added)
According to the Sentencing Project, as of 2010 an estimated 5.9 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction, a number equivalent to 2.5% of the U.S. voting-age population and a sharp increase from the 1.2 million people affected by felony disenfranchisement in 1976.[46] Given the prison populations, the effects have been most disadvantageous for minority and poor communities.[47]
Since Wikipedia mentions Canada, and I am Canadian, I wanted to see just where Canada stands, although I do know that Canadian felons have the right to vote, even when they are incarcerated. This from The Canadian Encyclopedia:
In challenges to the Canada Elections Act between 1986 and 2002, prison inmates in Manitoba and Ontario met with mixed success in their various Charter challenges to the statutory denial of their right to vote. The question was eventually resolved in the prisoners’ favour in a 5 to 4 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada (Sauvé v. Canada, 2002). As a consequence, all restrictions on prisoners’ voting rights at both the federal and provincial levels were struck down.
Sauvé v Canada refers to the case of Richard Sauvé, a former member of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club incarcerated for life for 1st degree murder. For those who argue that felons and ex-felons should not be able to vote, some felons get involved in trying to help others in many ways. Sauvé is one such case in Canada. Certainly TomCat can shed light on this aspect with his prison volunteer work in Oregon which he has done for years. He personally knows some felons that are making a difference. Why should they be denied the right to vote?
This from the Canadian Human Rights Council on the Sauvé challenge:
Some argued that taking away a prisoner’s right to vote was a reasonable violation of the charter given that they were irresponsible, uninformed, and simply undeserving.
Both the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada disagreed.
First, they found that the right to vote can’t be limited to just a “decent and responsible citizenry.” Governments had used this restriction to discriminate against citizens on the basis of colour, race, and gender in the past.
Second, the courts ruled that prisoners could not be banned from voting under the pretext that they were isolated from society. With access to cable television and newspapers, prisoners could still stay on top of developments and make informed decisions.
Third, denying the right to vote is a blanket punishment. As such, s.51(e) of the Canada Elections Act was not a “proportional response”; therefore, section 1 of the charter would not allow it to discriminate against prisoners.
Do those arguments sound familiar? They do to me and I agree with the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
What’s more, in Canada, the reconviction rate for all the releases in the first year was 44% with the reconviction rate for violence considerably lower (14%). The non-violent reconviction rate was 30% accounting for the majority of reconvictions. In the UK, the recidivism rate is 50% while it is over 60% in the US. Investing in rehabilitation including voting rights could help reduce recidivism which can only be good.
Canada does not have a spotless record on voting rights historically, but it has made great strides and continues to look at the impact of all decisions on charter rights closely.
The US needs to address the inequity in voting rights, not just for felons but for all people that are disenfranchised, nationally. When Trump goes to prison for his nefarious actions, do you think he will lose his voting rights? If others do, then he should also given that his crimes are analogous to treason.
For two countries so close, we are definitely two very different nations.
Posted to Care2 at http://www.care2.com/news/member/775377582/4080845
5 Responses to “Voting Rights for Felons — A Contrast Between Two Countries”
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Thank you for bringing this up – a subject very near to my heart and to TC’s heart, as I’m sure you know.
You’ve made this very clear and understandable; the only thing I would add is that many of the Democratic volunteers on the ground prior to the election were doing their best to track down voters disenfranchised illegally beccause of felony convictions and get them registeres – in fact, doing the job of the Secretary of State, the job which he was emphatically NOT doing. Their reward for this, before the election, was to be slandered as election frausdters who were registering people illegally (when exactly the opposite was the truth.) This was used in advertising to slander the candidate as well. Fortunately, they have been rewarded better now by Doug Jones’ victory.
I’m sure I’ve said this before … but dismissing felons/prisoners as no longer human is a bipartisan failing. I find it very upsetting. Thanks again for bringing up the issue.
Once people have served their time, they need to be welcomed back into society, not treated as pariahs or vermin. Unfortunately, our society has the head that once a criminal, always a criminal. People with records have a hard time finding jobs, housing, loans, etc. The work they do while incarcerated is not intended to get them ready for returning to societal circulation, but grunt work so some greedy corporation doesn’t have to pay real employees a decent wage. As a result, they have the choice of either starving to death or turning to crime. No wonder there is such a high rate of recidivism in this country.
AMEN !!
Great one Squatch! Amen Freya!
Thanks for this excellent article based on some serious research, Lynn. Perhaps some examples of how two other countries handle voting for felons and ex-felons makes the contrast between America and other western countries even starker.
In The Netherlands people who go to prison for whatever reason don’t lose their voting rights, so the right to vote revoked permanently or even for a period of time is an aberration to the Dutch. The right of all people to vote in elections, without any discrimination, is one of the most fundamental of all human rights and civil liberties.
In Australia, however, people are disqualified from voting if they are in prison serving a sentence of three years or more, despite Australian federal law recognising the human rights law that suggests that any exclusion of prisoners must be ‘objective’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘proportionate’ to the offence and the sentence. Drawing the line at a sentence of three years or more seems rather arbitrary.
The Australian Human Rights Commission believes that enfranchisement is a powerful and positive tool to assist with social reintegration and rehabilitation of prisoner. Giving prisoners the right to vote would be consistent with Australia’s obligation to ensure that the penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.
The discussion is still ongoing for prisoners, but there has not been a debate on what happens after a prisoner is released: after release an ex-felon has his voting rights restored.
Note that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for just over a quarter (27%) of the total Australian prisoner population this year. The total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia aged 18 years and over in 2017 was approximately 2% of the Australian population aged 18 years and over. Marginalisation of certain groups certainly occurs in Australia, but voter suppression seems to play only a minor role here.