Restoring the Vote to Former Prisoners
Analysis
The United States trumpets its support for fair elections all around the globe. At the same time, however, this country has less regard for the voting rights of people convicted of crimes — even after they have paid their debts to society — than any other nation in the democratic world.
In fact, all of the 5.3 million convicted felons who will be barred from the polls in the November elections would be welcomed to vote if they were citizens of dozens of other nations in Europe and the Americas.
(You can read a report about different nations’ approaches to felon voting here.)
Many other nations value the right to vote so much that they bring the ballot box right into prison. Governments in other democracies have long realized that it makes good sense to keep prison inmates connected to, and invested in, the society to which they must inevitably return once they are released.
The American approach is quite different. We tend to shun people who commit crimes — not just while they do time, but quite often for the rest of their lives. We bar them from housing, jobs, and yes, we strip them of the right to vote.
Through these policies, we have created a large and growing felon class that is permanently cut off from the mainstream and stuck on a treadmill that often leads right back to the prison door.
Rules that bar former inmates from the polls are excessively punitive, socially alienating and inconsistent with the core principles of American democracy. Beyond that, former inmates who actually participate in the electoral process are less likely to end up back in prison.
But according to “Expanding the Vote,'’ a new study from the research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project (you can read a pdf of it here) 35 states “ still prohibit some combination of persons on probation, parole, and/or people who have completed their sentences from voting.”
According to the same study, public attitudes toward disenfranchisement are beginning to shift. “As the public has become increasingly aware of these restrictive policies,” the study notes, “there has been a groundswell of support for change. Public opinion surveys report that 8 in 10 Americans support voting rights for persons who have completed their sentence and nearly two-thirds support voting rights for persons on probation or parole.’’
Over the last decade, the report says, 19 states have amended disenfranchisement policies in an effort to expand voter eligibility. Nine of these states have either repealed or amended lifetime disenfranchisement laws. And five have improved the restoration process for people seeking to have their rights restored.
But recovering the right to vote can be hellishly difficult, even in states that have passed laws that are supposed to make it easier. According to another eye-opening report entitled “De Facto Disenfranchisement,” by The American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center For Justice at New York University Law School (available here):
[D]isenfranchisement by law of millions of American citizens is only half the story. Across the country there is persistent confusion among election officials about their state’s felony disenfranchisement policies. Election officials receive little or no training on these laws, and there is little or no coordination or communication between election offices and the criminal justice system. These factors, coupled with complex laws and complicated registration procedures, result in the mass dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information, which in turn leads to the de facto disenfranchisement of untold hundreds of thousands of eligible would-be voters throughout the country.
The obvious solution is for the states to restore people’s voting rights automatically, once they leave prison. An automatic system of this kind would eliminate the need for complicated rules that even state officials themselves find difficult to comprehend.
It would also bring The United States a step closer to the policies promoted by more enlightened democracies around the world.