In her book, The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, Michelle Alexander describes how the ongoing mass incarceration has created a new system of racial discrimination, which she calls the “new Jim Crow.” No example better illustrates her thesis than felony disenfranchisement.
Mass incarceration has greatly increased the country’s prison populations and the community of people with a criminal record. This has increased the number of people banned from voting due to a felony conviction. As a result, over 4.6 million Americans with a felony conviction were disenfranchised as of 2022, disproportionately impacting African Americans.
Although rates of drug use and sales are similar across racial and ethnic lines, Black and Latino people are far more likely to be criminalized than white people. Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races. But black people comprise 30 percent of those arrested for drug law violations – and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations. Further, while black men are six times more likely to be arrested for drugs than white men, they are 10 percent less likely to use drugs.
One prominent effect of this disparity is that nearly eight percent of Black people of voting age are denied the right to vote because of laws that disenfranchise people with felony convictions.
One important right that Felony disenfranchisement takes away is voting. 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 were disenfranchised in 2016, which obviously had some effect on the presidential election that year as Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was just 113,000.
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 removed from Florida’s voter rolls. African Americans, who favored Gore at 86 percent, accounted for 11 percent of the state’s voters but 41 percent of those purged. Thus, it is clear that but for Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law and the removal of eligible people from the voting rolls, Gore would have won Florida and become president.
The issue of voter disenfranchisement is currently an issue of partisan politics – Republicans push for these laws, and Democrats tend to push against them. As we ended the 20th century, four states – Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia – took 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. His successor, Governor Terry Branstad, reversed that order in January 2011.
In 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, then a Republican but later a Democrat, instituted automatic vote restoration to felons who had completed their full sentences. However, in March of 2011, under Republican Governor Rick Scott, Florida rescinded automatic vote restoration for convicted felons.
In November 2015, toward the end of his term, Democratic Governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky issued an executive order restoring voting rights to all ex-felons who had completed their sentences and were disenfranchised because of non-violent convictions. But this restoration was short-lived when new Republican Governor Matt Bevin issued an executive order barring all individuals with past felony convictions from voting unless the governor restored their 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, Republicans appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, which ruled McAuliffe’s executive order unconstitutional as he had overstepped his authority.
But there is good news! We can remove Virginia from this list of most harsh states by voting “Yes” on Question 3 on the Virginia Ballot on November 3, which states: “Provide that persons convicted of felonies have their voting rights restored upon release from incarceration.”
