By Lindsay Beyerstein
Posted on April 10, 2007, Printed on April 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/50380/
Bravo to Florida governor Charlie Crist for persuading his state's clemency board to let most felons regain their voting rights after they get out of jail:
Florida has as many as 950,000 disenfranchised ex-offenders -- far more than any other state -- the vast majority black. Other states have repealed or scaled back similar bans in recent years, but roughly five million felons remain barred from the polls nationwide.
The ban, added to Florida's Constitution in 1868, has been the subject of especially bitter debate since the 2000 presidential election. Some legal voters were removed from the state's rolls that year after being misidentified as felons, adding to the drama of a recount that gave George W. Bush a razor-thin margin of victory over Al Gore.
Only two other states...
...Kentucky and Virginia, constitutionally require all felons to forfeit their voting rights. A federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Florida's ban made its way to the United States Supreme Court in 2005, but the court declined to hear the case.
Until now in Florida, most felons who finished prison and probation time had to submit to a lengthy review and waiting period, and sometimes an investigation and hearing, if they wanted to regain the right to vote.
Under the new rules, the roughly 80 percent of ex-offenders whose crimes were not considered violent will win automatic rights restoration after the state makes sure they have paid any restitution to victims and have no pending criminal charges. [NYT]
It's outrageous that so many states strip all convicted felons of voting rights for life. Why should a 3-month sentence for burglary strip you of your voting rights for as long as you live?
One of the more annoying shibboleths I hear from self-styled law and order types is: "If you're a felon, you lose your rights."
That saying is irritating because it's question-begging. We all agree that felons lose some rights for a certain amount of time. That's almost part of the definition of a state-imposed punishment… For example, if you're imprisoned, you lose your right to be free of restraint for the duration of your sentence. On the other hand, you don't lose all your rights just because you're in jail. You certainly don't lose all your rights forever after you served your sentence.
Another popular law and order saying is, "If you do the crime, you do the time." I don't mind that one so much because it suggests that there is a set time that you have to do. Once you've done the time, you should be allowed to return to society, having paid your debt.
If states want to suspend people's voting rights while they're actually in jail or on parole or probation, that's at least defensible. Maybe it's fair to exclude people from voting as part of their punishment. Also, if legislators want to write vote-stripping provisions into specific criminal statutes, that's fine too. Let the politicians take responsibility for saying who is so bad that they have to be cast out of democracy for life.
In Florida, sex offenders and murderers probably won't get their voting rights back. That's a reasonable compromise. There's a world of difference between a non-violent drug offender and a serial murderer. I would prefer that we didn't make voting rights conditional, but if we're prepared to strip some rights (like freedom of movement) as punishment, I don't see a categorical reason to take loss of voting rights off the table when it comes to punishing various crimes.
Allowing felons to vote is also an important brake on abuses of state power. Normally, politicians have to make cost-benefit calculations when they pander to the electorate. If you shaft one contingency to please another, the shafted group may strike back and vote you out. However, if you arrange to prevent the people who might have a grudge against you from ever voting again, you're home free. That's the enviable position of many so-called "tough on crime" politicians who make a big show of charging more people with crimes, or subjecting convicted criminals to ever-harsher punishments.
Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.
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