New York Times September 17, 2004
By BRENT STAPLES
Pundits blame apathy for the decline in voter turnout
that has become a fact of life in the
United States in the last several decades. But not everyone
who skips the polls on Election Day does so by choice. This
November, for example, an estimated five million people -
roughly 2.3 percent of the number of people eligible to vote
- will be barred from voting by state laws that strip
convicted felons of the franchise, often temporarily but
sometimes for life.
These laws cast a permanent shadow over the poor minority
communities where disenfranchised people typically live.
Children grow up with the unfortunate example of neighbors,
parents and grandparents who never vote and never engage in
the political process, even superficially.
As a consequence, the struggling communities that need
political leadership most of all are trapped within a
posture of disengagement that deepens from one generation to
the next.
While many things will need to change before the country
can reinvigorate the electorate, doing away with
postprison sanctions - the most punitive in the democratic
world - has to be near the top of the list.
The case for doing so has recently been laid out in a
deluge of lawsuits, reports and studies that document
the corrosive effects of disenfranchisement on the civic
life of this country.
The most startling of these studies, published by
Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and
Jeff Manza at Northwestern
University, shows that the number of people touched by these
laws far exceeds the five or so million who have officially
and directly lost the right to vote.
For starters, hundreds of thousands of people who are
still eligible to vote will not do so this year because they
will be locked up in local jails, awaiting processing or
trials for minor offenses.
An even larger group of eligible voters, numbering
perhaps in the millions, may stay
away from the polls because they are
confused by the law and mistakenly believe that they
have lost the right to vote.
Republican operatives have deliberated used scare tactics
with this group of voters - most of them Democrats -
in the hope of keeping them home on Election Day. Taken
together, the truly disenfranchised, who are actually barred
from voting under the law, and the de facto disenfranchised,
who don't vote because they are confused about the law,
could account for 5 percent of the voting-age population.
A vast majority of the disenfranchised in this country
would meet the qualifications for voting if they were
citizens of Britain, France, Germany or Australia.
Indeed, many nations value the
franchise so much that they arrange
for people to vote even from prison.
Why does America treat convicted felons so much worse
than other democracies? Legal scholars attribute the problem
to this country's difficulties with race.
In particular, they cite the racist backlash in the South
during Reconstruction, when former slaveowners were forced
to endure the sight of former slaves' lining up to vote at
polling places and actually holding seats in state
legislatures.
Led by Mississippi, the Southern states eventually
adopted a series of measures that
wrote black citizens right out of the
state constitutions. New statutes barred black
Americans from the ballot box with poll taxes,
literacy tests, grandfather clauses
and laws that took the vote away from people who committed
certain crimes.
The crimes were carefully selected so they would affect
the maximum number of black Americans while exempting as
many whites as possible. For example, new state laws
sometimes disenfranchised people for petty theft, minor
swindling and wife-beating - crimes that were more likely to
be prosecuted among blacks - while omitting murder and
robbery. The legislative intent relied heavily on the
unequal enforcement of the law.
The disenfranchisement campaign swept black Americans
from elected office and knocked them off the voting rolls.
There were suddenly counties in the South where black people
outnumbered their white neighbors by four to one but where
not a single black name could be found on the voting rolls.
Black people who fled the South found that the states in
the North had also begun to adopt disenfranchisement
laws as their black populations grew.
This shameful legacy is plainly visible today in
statistics showing that black people represent 40 percent of
the disenfranchisement cases but only about 12 percent of
the national population. The broader community, which was
once indifferent to this problem, has begun to take notice
since the states have embraced new sentencing policies that
transform drug misdemeanors into felonies, driving up the
prison population sevenfold, to an eye-popping 1.4 million
today from a mere 200,000 in the 1970's.
With the population of ex-felons at more than 13 million
and growing, the country has no choice but to revisit
laws that strip people of the right
to vote while permanently consigning them to the margins of
society.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are rushing to
associate themselves with a campaign to restore the vote to
former felons. The general public, however, understands
clearly that the right to vote is a basic human right.
Restoring voting rights to former felons would move the
United States closer to its peers in the democratic world -
and closer to its founding ideals. It would also drive a
stake through one of the last relics of an ugly racist past.
....back to:
....alternative news
American Pictures
....gives Moore
thanks
....gives pizza
.....gives the plane truth
....gives
liberation
.....gives you the
blues
......gives Bush a human face
.....gives billionaires for Bush a free rap
....gives you the
world vote on Bush-Kerry
|