{"id":30651,"date":"2017-12-18T14:45:41","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T22:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=30651"},"modified":"2017-12-18T23:50:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-19T07:50:39","slug":"voting-rights-for-felons-a-contrast-between-two-countries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/18\/voting-rights-for-felons-a-contrast-between-two-countries\/","title":{"rendered":"Voting Rights for Felons — A Contrast Between Two Countries"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Unfortunately, people of colour are disproportionately affected.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>strident partisan<\/a> Republican, would have taken steps to inform his state\u2019s voters than thousands of ex-felons were eligible to vote under a 2017 state law. But Merrill didn\u2019t do that, <\/span>…<\/span><\/p>\n

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6. I’m here to talk about Alabama’s outrageous locking out of people with convictions (disproportionately people of color) from the electoral franchise.<\/p>\n

7. Hundreds of thousands of people in Alabama either couldn’t vote yesterday in the #<\/s>ALSEN<\/a> election or thought they couldn’t vote bc of AL SOS’s failure to communicate the law.<\/p>\n

8. Here’s a long but important timeline. In 1901, #<\/s>alabama<\/a> created a criminal disenfranchisement law designed to disenfranchise blacks. They said as much right in the record.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

10. In 1985, the Supreme Court struck down the moral turpitude phrase as racially discriminatory because duh. But in 1996, the #<\/s>AL<\/a> legislature put the “moral turpitude” standard BACK INTO THE LAW.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n