In the U.S., nearly 6.1 million Americans are prohibited from voting due to a felony conviction. Disenfranchisement persists nationwide as a racially-charged crutch used by the far right to maintain power over their electorate and exclude the contributions of black Americans and other minorities who form the majority of our incarcerated population. Proponents of disenfranchisement emphasize protecting our democracy under the weak defense of morality, arguing that our electorate would be severely compromised if former felons were allowed to vote.
However, compared with fellow democracies across the globe, the U.S. remains the only nation left implementing the most restrictive voting policies toward formerly incarcerated individuals, when in reality these laws should have been deserted alongside slavery. The Sentencing Project reports that around one in every 56 Americans, and about one in every 13 African-American adults, are barred from the polls due to a felony conviction, and in four states, it is more than one in every five. If we as a nation aim to rectify this fundamentally unfair phenomenon and drastically increase voter turnout, with reverberating effects across political and social institutions, then we must eliminate disenfranchisement.
Against our nation’s broader history of systematic racism and discrimination, disenfranchisement serves as an extension of that unscrupulous past, hindering present and future social-justice campaigns. Disenfranchisement as a means of disproportionately stripping Black Americans of their voting rights extends back to Reconstruction, when Southern lawmakers combined criminal laws targeting black citizens with broad-scale disenfranchisement in an effort to suppress and withhold their former slaves’ affirmations of dignity and civic expression.
As a result of centuries’ discrimination toward black Americans, the prison sector has become incontrovertibly knotted with racial prejudice, manifesting in the disproportionate persecution of African-Americans at the hands of white police officers. According to the Harvard Kennedy School, between 1980 and 2010, the adult male population that had received a felony conviction rose roughly eight percent, but for African-American men, it soared roughly 20 percent. The prison sector’s synonymy with black Americans has made it a prime target for disenfranchisement by white lawmakers. Even further, they have targeted other minorities. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a 2003 study found that of 10 states, nine “disenfranchise the Latino community at rates greater than the general population.” Since the vast majority of felons are low-income, minority citizens, disenfranchisement excludes our most vulnerable population from democratic participation, exacerbating current racial divides across healthcare and education systems. By omitting these citizens from voting, the U.S. fails to uphold its founding commitment to an equitable society for all.
However, denying felons their ballot rights not only restricts their civic capabilities, but also has cascading effects on voter turnout in the felon’s wider community. Political scientist Vesla Weaver from Yale University writes that disenfranchisement prevents others with whom the individual associates and politically aligns, such as friends, families and neighbors, from voting as well. According to Politico, one of the foremost reasons why voter turnout has recently increased is due to renewed emphasis on connecting voters in today’s campaigns. Nowhere is this increase more true than in a felon’s own community, making disenfranchisement counter-intuitive to raising our dismally low 55.7 percent voter turnout rate for all voters, not just former felons.
If felons were allowed to vote, politicians would be forced to consider the interests of this population before enacting policies that exacerbate issues related to mass incarceration. As a result, we would see more policies aimed toward supporting felons not only during their time in prison, but also upon reentry into society. Perhaps we would observe an erasure of the divisive psychological, social and economic barriers between prison and reentry, bolstering black Americans and evening the historic inequities that have accompanied unequal incarceration in this country.
By disenfranchising felons, many of whom are minorities charged with only minor crimes, we not only contradict our democratic values, but we also lose the opportunity to augment voter turnout, thus alleviating mass incarceration and other issues deemed important to minority populations. At a very practical level, the lost accomplishments and productivity of society by devaluing a wide sector of the population’s human and civic potential have been incalculable. It is far time that we join the legion of nations across the world who, by promoting universal suffrage, have also emphasized what is arguably citizens’ most valuable contribution to their nation’s form of government: the right to vote.
Photo courtesy of Michael Fleshman/Flickr
