Voting rights are still highly contested throughout the United States. Across the country, many states are passing stringent ID laws that make it hard for Americans – particularly African-Americans, the elderly, students and people with disabilities – to exercise their fundamental right to vote. But if you are a former convict, even with no parole to serve and now living a reformed life, chances are that state laws ban you from voting at all.
Currently there are 5.85 million Americans who are denied the basic right vote because they have a criminal record. The states with the most restrictions on ex-convict voting rights are Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming.
Each of these states has imposed a lifetime ban preventing former convicts from voting. Other states like Minnesota have not banned former convicts from voting, but former convicts must serve their time and complete their parole before they can vote. There are only two states — Vermont and Maine — that allow convicts to cast absentee ballots from prisons.
The crackdown on ballot access has been aggressively fought by Republican states with high populations of African-Americans and Latinos, and which have a history of voter suppression. If voting rights were restored to those former inmates, about 4.3 million more Americans would be able to vote.
The overturning of portions of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court — where states and localities with a history of racial discrimination needed to get permission from the federal government to enact any changes to their voting laws — changed the voting landscape. This change to the Voting Rights Act coupled with the outright banning of former convicts from voting has disproportionately disenfranchised the African-American community in many states with Republican legislatures, raising questions on whether there is a veiled racism in these laws.
Sen. Rand Paul (R) believes that some of these laws violate an individual’s constitutional right and discriminate against the African-American community. Speaking at the Senate, he said, “If I told you that one out of three African-American males is forbidden by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow 50 years ago”
“Yet today,” Paul said, “a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting because of the War on Drugs.”
Sen. Rand Paul believes that ex-convict voting restrictions hark back to the days of open racial oppression. While addressing the largely Black Russell neighborhood in Louisville, Ken., he went on to say that “felons should be able to exercise their constitutional rights.”
When addressing an African-American audience in a forum in Louisville, he added, “The statistics show that this is racially directed,” arguing that young African-American men are disproportionately represented in prison populations and should not suffer lifetime consequences for mistakes in their youth.
According to Jean Chung, author of a Sentencing Project report on felony disenfranchisement, one in every 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than the rest of the adult population. And in certain states the statistics are alarmingly high: in Florida, 23 percent of Black voters are disenfranchised; in Kentucky, 22 percent; and in Virginia, 20 percent – that’s more than one in five Black adults who cannot vote.
The social consequences of disenfranchising generations of Black voters will bring about more racial tension within communities. Speaking to Mint Press News, former convict Dayne Johnson, who did time in Texas State Prison, explains how difficult it is to live in a community:
“Nobody wants you … you can’t get a job. Who wants to hire a Black man, anyway? And as soon as they see your record, that’s it — it’s over.
“No money, no place to live. I had a place when I was on parole, but when that ended my landlord kicked me out and I’ve been sleeping over at people’s houses. What kind of life is that? Got no place of my own, so I have to go out a lot … And then it’s the cops hassling me, searching me all the time. Staying out of prison is hard – like everyone is wanting to push me back there.”
Each day, Dayne faces barriers stopping him from living a normal life. Unable to get a job or a driver’s license, and constantly under police surveillance, Dayne’s life is becoming more and more disconnected from society.
“We need to change things up. If I could vote, sure, I would vote these people out. That’s why they want to stop all Black people from voting … It all about control, and them keep it … The way they’re doing this is racial. Black people won’t take it — just watch,” he said.
Chung reports that restricting felons’ voting rights will perpetuate racial disparities at earlier steps in the criminal justice process. As many young Black men are disproportionately exposed to police profiling and stop-and-search tactics, they are punished for drug offense more harshly than White defendants. When they leave the penal system, they are again subjected to more barriers, no jobs, no prospects and no vote.
There is a need for ex-convicts to change their lives — and casting a vote is one way of changing. With more Republican states imposing harsher restrictions to voter rights, it seems change will be more difficult for some.
“This is a larger problem, where basically, if you live in a blue state, you have one set of rights,” says NBC News’ Chuck Todd. “And if you live in a red state – you have another set of rights.”