Florida extends the franchise

Florida's get out of jail card
Sasha Abramsky

April 9, 2007 12:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2007/04/so_pigs_can_actually_fly.html

Last week was a big one in American politics. Not only was there the supreme court's ruling on greenhouse gas emissions, but also the decision by Florida's governor Charlie Crist to dramatically expand his state's franchise, returning the vote to hundreds of thousands of people who, at some point in their past, were convicted of a felony.

Almost every state in the US temporarily removes criminals' right to vote while they are doing time. Some people argue deprivation of political rights is a legitimate collateral consequence of a person being convicted of law-breaking. If you're bad enough to be in prison, the line of reasoning goes, you're unlikely to be an asset to the political process. Others argue the rationale for disenfranchisement isn't particularly strong, especially since it fails to distinguish between high and low-end crimes. Strong or not, it's common practice. It's also in line with how many other democracies, including the UK, treat the issue.

More controversially, many states extend disenfranchisement into a person's post-prison life. Some take away the vote from parolees - a strange practice, since parole often implies an institutional confidence that a prisoner has been rehabilitated enough to be given a chance at life on the outside, and, presumably, once rehabilitated he or she should be able to have a say in who occupies political office. Some impose waiting periods after a person's sentence is up before he can vote again. Some tie voting rights to a felon's ability to pay all the financial restitution fees imposed by the courts - perhaps okay in theory, but, in practice an all-but-impossible proposition for most low-income ex-cons. And others go further still, introducing so many obstacles to a person's re-enfranchisement that to all intents and purposes they permanently remove the right to vote of almost everybody ever convicted of a felony.

Last year, my book Conned was published. It documented the extraordinary rise of a voteless underclass in America, and the impact that this expanding disenfranchisement was having on the country's political system.

While I was writing my book, I toured the country interviewing the disenfranchised. In the end, I wrote my book as a cross-country travelogue, a journey from the disenfranchisement hotspot of Washington state in the northwest to Florida in the southeast. I interviewed hundreds of men and women. While some couldn't care less about their inability to vote, most told me it was deeply traumatizing to them. They used words like "humiliating," and "caste system." One young man in Memphis, Tennessee told me he'd wanted to vote for so long that, if finally given the opportunity to do so, he'd "stand in awe in the booth all day long."

Whereas permanent disenfranchisement was commonplace across the country a century ago, these days it's almost exclusively a practice found in the states of the old South. These are the states that over-incarcerate the most to begin with - upwards of one per cent of the total population in many southern states are in prison - and they're also the states with the most extreme racial disparities in their prison systems. Thus, in Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, Florida and several other states, as the "war on drugs" and on crime have ramped up the size of the population behind bars, so upwards of one in four African American men have ended up permanently barred from voting. Put simply, the war on drugs has ended up rolling back many of the suffrage achievements of the civil rights movement.

The worst state in this regards is Floridahttp://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/lawreview/v100/n3/1439/LR100n3Shaw.pdf

In 2000, Bush's margin of victory came down to a few hundred contested votes in Florida. That same election, the state of Florida estimated about half a million convicted felons, most of them ex-cons living in the community, couldn't vote. Outside experts put the number at closer to three quarters of a million. Thousands of others had been "purged" from the voter rolls by a faulty databasing system that misidentified large numbers of people as being "ex-felons." A suspiciously large number of these men and women were from demographic groups that were most likely to vote for Democrats.

By 2004, Florida's disenfranchisement problem had gotten even bigger. By then, an estimated million people, or about nine per cent of Florida's adult citizen population, was voteless. In my book, I argued that disenfranchisement was now a large enough factor in many states that, in addition to affecting congressional races, it could make, and in 2000 had made, the difference between a Democrat and a Republican winning the presidency.

For years Republican politicians in Florida have fought a rearguard action against re-enfranchisement legislation. Even though permanent disenfranchisement has proved hard to defend philosophically, and even though most major news organizations have editorialized against the practice for years, the GOP feared that wholesale re-enfranchisement of low income and minority people (the two categories that make up the bulk of this new voteless underclass) would boost the Democrats and hurt the Republicans.

Crist is a Republican. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that he has decided to abandon mass disenfranchisement. The reform he has signed onto is by no means ideal - it still ties voting rights to payment of court-ordered financial penalties; it continues to disenfranchise parolees and those on probation; and it excludes certain categories of violent and habitual offenders, who must still go through bureaucratic hoops and wait many years before getting their vote restored. But it's a whole lot better than nothing. If it's implemented properly, hundreds of thousands of Floridians will automatically get their vote restored.

While many states in the past seven years have removed their permanent disenfranchisement provisions, I've always been somewhat pessimistic about Republicans in Florida dismantling this peculiar institution. In fact, I've always thought it about as likely as pigs suddenly being able to fly. Now, it seems, a Republican governor has decided to take the plunge. As I finish writing this, I think I see a big porcine beast flapping its wings in the sky outside my window.