Today Congress is listening to 4 million silenced Americans. Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee are holding a hearing on the Democracy Restoration Act, legislation that seeks to restore the right to vote to people with a criminal records who are out of prison, living in the community. This bill would eliminate the last blanket barrier to the franchise, and reverse decade of discrimination create by laws firmly rooted in our country’s Jim Crow history.
Today 5.3 million American citizens are denied the right to vote because of a criminal conviction in their past. Four million are people who are out of prison, living in the community. States vary on whether, when and how they restore voting rights to people with criminal conviction, but all told 35 states continue to disenfranchise people who are out of prison, often for decades and sometimes for life.
Criminal disenfranchisement laws trace directly back to Jim Crow and were part of a concerted effort to maintain white control over access to the polls. Enacted alongside poll taxes and literacy tests, criminal disenfranchisement laws were part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments. At the same time states enacted these disenfranchisement provisions, they began to expand the criminal codes to punish offense they believed freed slaves were most likely to commit. The result: suppressed African-American political power for decades. Today, 13% of African-American men in our country have lost the right to vote.
A new report by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights finds that nearly one-in-four African Americans has lost the right to vote in Kentucky. The report makes clear that this shockingly high rate of disenfranchisement results from a racially biased criminal justice system and Kentucky’s archaic criminal disenfranchisement law.
Kentucky is one of the last two states [see pdf map] in the country (Virginia is the other) that denies the right to vote for life to anyone with a felony conviction, unless the current Governor restores the right through his clemency powers.
The Commission on Human Rights report covers a variety of subjects impacting African Americans in Kentucky, including graduation rates, employment by public agencies, socioeconomic status, unemployment rates, hate crimes, and interactions with the criminal justice system. Although the report acknowledges the progress that Kentucky has made in improving the status of African Americans as compared to a half century ago, it reveals that there is still a long way to go to eradicate racial bias.
Perhaps most troubling, the report reveals a racial bias deeply embedded in Kentucky’s criminal justice system. African Americans are three times more likely than whites to be arrested in Kentucky. Though African Americans make up just 7.7% of Kentucky’s population, they are nearly one-third of people who are incarcerated. The incarceration rate for African Americans in Kentucky is about five times that of whites. No matter how one views the numbers, Kentucky’s criminal justice system clearly has a disparate impact on African Americans.
The entrenched racial bias in Kentucky’s criminal justice system results in the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 2004, Kentucky denied the right to vote for life to almost fifty thousand of its approximately two hundred thousand African American residents. Today, the disenfranchisement rate remains practically unchanged.
Because the current disenfranchisement law vests so much power in the Governor, the rate of disenfranchisement can vary widely depending on who is in office. A 2006 study by the League of Women Voters showed that the Governor approved rights restoration applications at half the rate of the one who preceded him. The number of applications for restoration nosedived primarily because the then Governor created several additional administrative hurdles for the restoration process, including requiring three character witnesses and an essay.
When Governor Beshear came into office, he took a positive first step by removing these burdensome requirements from the process. This is commendable, but only a first step. Kentucky’s General Assembly now has the opportunity to propose a constitutional amendment that would end the state's archaic and discriminatory scheme. However, the Senate version of the bill is sitting in Committee, where it has been for over a month. The Kentucky Senate should pass this bill and put the question on the ballot. Give Kentuckians who are eligible to vote the power and the opportunity to restore the vote to their fellow Kentuckians.
As the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights notes, there has been some progress in improving the status of African Americans in Kentucky. But the progress cannot hide that one-in-four African Americans in Kentucky cannot vote. It is time for Kentucky to modernize and simplify its voting rights restoration law.
Many people don’t realize that Jim Crow laws existed in the North, perhaps most notably in New York.
Our new study of the Empire State’s constitutional history, Jim Crow in New York, traces the current criminal disenfranchisement law to a century-long effort to keep African-American citizens out of the voting booth. And as our report makes it disturbingly clear: New York’s felon voting bar has deep roots in Jim Crow.
More than 108,000 New Yorkers are currently disenfranchised under the law. And 80% of those who have lost the right to vote are people of color.
Here is the history. For about 100 years, New York lawmakers found various ways to keep African Americans from voting. First, of course, there was slavery. After emancipation, two laws continued to be especially effective: one that required blacks - and only blacks - to own a certain amount of real property in order to vote; and another that allowed counties to disenfranchise those convicted of “infamous crimes.”
African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions, and the transcripts contain some astounding racist rhetoric. One theme that occurs again and again is an alleged criminal propensity among African Americans as a reason to restrict the black vote. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, Delegate Samuel Young implored in 1821: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom is now proposed to cloth with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
By 1872, New York distinguished itself as the only state in the union to make property ownership a voting requirement exclusively for African Americans. But the Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to revisit its constitution. Governor John Hoffman convened a few dozen “eminent citizens” to figure out what to do.
Governor Hoffman’s commission eliminated a few sections, and added some words here and there. The result was a Jim Crow “bait and switch” that continues to be the law today.
In 1874, four years after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified and long after the rest of the country, New York’s legislature had no choice but to accept the commission’s recommendation and eliminate the property requirements for African-American voters. However, the same commission also recommended a small and barely noticed change to the wording of the criminal disenfranchisement provision which had an enormous – and lasting – adverse impact on African-American suffrage. During slavery and the period when the property requirements were imposed on African-Americans, New York’s criminal disenfranchisement law was merely permissive: that is, the state constitution left it to the discretion of individual counties whether to disenfranchise those with criminal convictions. The same year the Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to eliminate its property requirement, the state amended the constitution from allowing counties to decide whether to disenfranchise those convicted of crimes, to requiring disenfranchisement throughout the state of anyone convicted of an “infamous crime.”
New York’s calculating constitutional amendment falls into a national pattern in which criminal disenfranchisement laws provided a useful means of circumventing the Reconstruction Amendments and suppressing black voters. Between 1865 and 1900, 19 other states passed similar laws. By 1900, 38 states had some type of criminal voting restriction. This national movement, together with New York’s long and notorious history of deliberate efforts to disenfranchise African Americans, the enduring, widespread and well-documented belief among policymakers that blacks were more likely to commit crimes, and the timing corresponding with the elimination of the black property requirements, all lead to the same conclusion: the amendment was intended to suppress the African-American vote in New York.
The same law is on the books today, and its intended effects continue. “When a law can be traced clearly to a racially discriminatory start-point, the burden of proving the absence of racial taint in the current operation of the law should fall on those who seek to justify its continued existence,” Charles J. Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard, wrote in the introduction to the report.
There is a broadening consensus across the country that restoring the right to vote to people living in the community is not just important for our democracy, but that giving people a voice in the community makes them stakeholders and less likely to commit future crimes.
"When people with criminal convictions re-enter society after periods of incarceration, although often jobless, isolated, and broken, they must begin to re-connect and re-engage with their communities. We have a stake in whether they succeed," Professor Ogletree wrote.
Today, New York’s election law disenfranchises people while in prison and on parole.
There are currently several bills pending in the New York State Assembly and Senate that would restore the voting rights to those on parole.
In 2009, Senator Montgomery and Assemblyman Wright introduced the Voting Rights Notification and Registration Act. The bill would require the Department of Corrections and the Board of Parole to provide individuals information about their voting rights once they regained eligibility. The bill passed the full Assembly in June 2009 and is currently pending in the Senate Elections Committee. In April 2009, the Brennan Center testified in favor of this bill.
Also in 2009, Assemblyman O’Donnell and Senator Thompson introduced a bill to restore the voting rights to people on parole. The bills have been referred to the Assembly Committee on Election Law and the Senate Committee on Elections.
The Democracy Restoration Act, introduced in July, is federal legislation that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to the nearly 4 million disenfranchised Americans who are out of prison and living in the community. The bill was introduced by Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI).
The Obama Administration supports full restoration of voting rights for the formerly-incarcerated. "The President's position is that, for felons, once you've served your sentence... you should have your voting rights restored," Heather Higginbottom announced in a video from the White House. Ms. Higgenbottom of the Domestic Policy Council urged federal policy in support of full voting rights.
Watch video (voting rights questions at 16:45), and see our work on the Democracy Restoration Act, which would allow for national automatic restoration of post-incarceration voting rights.
At the 2009 Annual Brennan Legacy Awards, Emmy Award-winning actor Alan Alda, read from a few of the stories featured in My First Vote -- a compilation of stories from people across the country who voted for the first time in November 2008 after having lost, and then regained, their right to vote following a criminal conviction.
More information on our work to restore voting right to people with criminal histories.
originally published in El Diario;translation below.
2009 was a big year for Latinos. We’ve had some setbacks, including an economic crisis in which the unemployment rate among Latino workers is almost thirteen percent. We also learned that 41% of our high school girls fail to graduate on time, if at all, and that they have the highest teen pregnancy rate of any racial or ethnic group.
But, we’ve had some enormous accomplishments. Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination and confirmation to be a Supreme Court Justice can and should be a source of pride for all Latinos. Latinos are also at the helm of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and Department of Labor.
We’ve also emerged victorious in the face of threats to our equal and fair participation in the life of the country. The Supreme Court rebuffed a carefully-orchestrated attack on arguably the country’s most successful piece of civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act. The Act prohibits states and local governments from enacting voting practices that discriminate based on race, and has been instrumental in breaking down voting barriers and bringing fair political representation to Latinos all over the country.
Those victories are important because large challenges loom ahead for us in 2010, especially in the area of immigration reform, and the anti-Latino bias that will accompany that issue. The 2010 elections will provide us with the opportunity to voice our concerns on important issues, but we must be politically involved. Two national reforms would help us translate our numbers into political influence, Voter Registration Modernization and the Democracy Restoration Act.
Voter Registration Modernization is an automated system of registering eligible consenting citizens from existing government lists, it could enfranchise the up to 65 million eligible Americans, including many Latinos, who are not currently registered to vote.
The Democracy Restoration Act allows American citizens returning to their communities from prison to vote in federal elections, encouraging these persons to become invested and involved in the well-being of their communities. While it is hard to say how many of the four million people living and working in the community who cannot vote because of a past criminal conviction are Latinos, we can expect those numbers to be sizeable, given that Latinos comprise up to 20% of the incarcerated population. These two reforms will allow us to be well-armed against the predicted and repeated barrage of misinformation and hate.
So with our setbacks making us more resilient and committed, our accomplishments making us louder and prouder, our victories making us stronger, let’s use our potential to make great gains for our communities and country in 2010.
Today marks the 44th anniversary of the landmark Voting Rights Act, passed to reverse the Jim Crow laws, which effectively denied African Americans the right to vote for decades.
The Act has accomplished great things. It eliminated poll taxes, literacy tests and other ballot box barriers. Within a few years of its passage, voter registration rates among African Americans doubled, tripled and in some states quadrupled.
Fast forward to the 2008 presidential election and its surge of African-American voter participation. Although the protections of the Act remain vital, according to one recent report, African-American women voters turned out at higher rates in November than any other racial, ethnic or gender group.
But one Jim Crow relic continues to elude the strong arms of the Voting Rights Act. Nationwide, 5.3 million American citizens are denied the right to vote because of a criminal conviction in their past. Four million are people who are out of prison, living in the community. Criminal disenfranchisement laws differ state-to-state. All told, 35 states continue to disenfranchise people released from prison.
Let's be clear, these laws were put in place right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests. In the late 1800s, as part of larger backlash against the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, criminal disenfranchisement laws spread throughout the country. At the same time, states expanded their criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed freed slaves were most likely to commit, including vagrancy, petty larceny and bigamy. This targeted criminalization and criminal disenfranchisement combined to produce the legal loss of voting rights, which effectively suppressed the power of African Americans for decades.
The laws' intended effects continue to this day. Nationwide, 13 percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote because of a criminal conviction. In eight states, more than 15 percent of African Americans cannot vote, and three of those states disenfranchise more than 20 percent of the African-American voting-age population. Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of African-American men will lose the right to vote at some point in their lifetime.
Despite the clear evidence of discriminatory intent and impact, courts continue to uphold these laws, finding that Congress did not intend to prohibit criminal disenfranchisement when it passed the Voting Rights Act. Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals was the latest to issue such a ruling.
Luckily, we have three branches of government, and Congress now has the opportunity to declare loud and clear that it is time to consign these laws to the Jim Crow past. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who are out of prison, living in the community. The Democracy Restoration Act is the Voting Rights Act of the 21st Century. Congress should move quickly to end voting discrimination once and for all.
It turns out democracy breeds strange bedfellows. On Friday, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI) introduced the Democracy Restoration Act of 2009, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to nearly 4 million American citizens with past criminal convictions who are out of prison and living in the community. Who would have thought that police chiefs and former prison inmates would ever unite behind the same cause? But that's exactly what is happening. A large and growing coalition of diverse interests including law enforcement officers, religious leaders, civil rights organizations and millions of formerly incarcerated people across the country has come together to restore the right to vote. Now members of Congress have joined the crowd.
Nationwide, 5.3. million Americans are disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction in their past. Four million are people who are out of prison and living in the community -- working, paying taxes and raising families. All told, 35 states continue to disenfranchise people who are not in prison, often for decades and sometimes for life.
Make no mistake, criminal disenfranchisement laws are firmly rooted in Jim Crow. They were put in place right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests and were intended to keep African Americans from the polls. Many states passed criminal disenfranchisement laws at the end of Reconstruction and targeted crimes most likely to be committed by freed slaves like larceny, bigamy and vagrancy. Today the laws continue to have their intended effect: nationwide 13% of African-American men are disenfranchised. If current incarceration rates continue, 1 in 3 African-American men will lose the right to vote at some point in their lives.
Criminal disenfranchisement laws form a patchwork across the country. Consider for example, people in Kentucky lose the right to vote for life, while just across the border in Ohio and Indiana people can vote the day they step out of prison. Someone in Utah can vote as long as he is not in prison, while in Colorado he could vote while on probation but not on parole; in New Mexico he would have to complete both probation and parole, and in Arizona he could be disenfranchised for life. It is no wonder both election officials and the public are confused, resulting in widespread and persistent misinformation and the de facto disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of eligible voters across the country.
The shameful roots of these laws and the conflicting standards among the states are just two factors that highlight the need for federal reform. The Democracy Restoration Act provides just that: It would restore voting rights in federal elections to every American citizen who is out of prison, living in the community.
The foundation for the bill has been steadily building in the states. In the last decade, 20 states have restored voting rights or eased the restoration process. This groundswell has created a national chorus calling for change which now includes law enforcement and criminal justice professionals and a broad spectrum of religious leaders. These groups have come together based on a shared understanding that restoring voting rights to people in the community not only strengthens our democracy, it helps prevent recidivism, protects public safety and is true to the fundamental principles of redemption and forgiveness.
The importance of having a voice in the community is most aptly described by those who have found theirs. The recent Brennan Center publication My First Vote is a compilation of stories from Americans who voted for the first time in November 2008 after having lost, and then regained, their voting rights after a conviction. According to a mother in California who is featured in the collection, "voting isn't entirely about the candidate who wins; it's about the inspiration and hope people feel when they have a voice they can use to bring real change."
The Democracy Restoration Act has just been introduced, and it is still full of inspiration and hope. Congress should move quickly to make it the law of the land. Strange bedfellows agree.
Kentucky is one of the last two states [
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