In 2004, while researching my book on the growing political impact of the disenfranchisement of Americans with felony records, I journeyed to Montana to interview an ex-prisoner and drug dealer named Casey Rudd.
The 54-year-old Rudd had gone from being an outlaw to being a respected community activist. She worked with prisoners and ex-prisoners to promote awareness of diseases such as hepatitis C which has reached epidemic proportions behind bars and had been granted both federal (under the Help America Vote Act of 2002) and state funds to educate ex-cons about their voting rights.
Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow for democracy at Demos, a New York City think-tank. His work has been published in Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, The American Prospect, the Nation and other journals. His new book is Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House
(New Press, 2006)
Also by Sasha Abramsky in openDemocracy:
"Whose al-Qaida problem?"
(October 2005)
Casey and her husband, Eddie, hit drug treatment centres, jails, prisons, and parole offices; they drove up and down the vast state in their battered old minivan; and, over the years, they'd distributed questionnaires to thousands of felons asking them questions about their political participation and their understanding of their political rights.
In theory, Montana should not have needed Rudd's education services on this issue. Unlike many other states, Montana allows prisoners to vote the moment they step out of prison. It doesn't deprive parolees and those on probation of their voting rights. And it most certainly doesn't have the system of permanent disenfranchisement in place that has removed more than half a million Floridians and hundreds of thousands of Alabamans, Mississippians, Virginians, and others from the electoral rolls in recent decades. Yet, Rudd has found that large majorities of ex-prisoners believe they have permanently lost the right to vote, and she has also found that significant numbers of local election officials simply have no idea whether or not felons can vote.
In Washington State, where 25% of black men have lost their right to vote because of felony convictions, the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union polled county election officials before the 2004 election. It found about half of them had no idea what felons who wanted to get their right to vote restored needed to do to facilitate the process.
By all accounts, similar confusion, both amongst felons and, more worrying, amongst officials who control access to the ballot, exists in New York State. In theory, New York allows people to vote once they have served their maximum prison sentence or been discharged from parole. It doesn't remove the vote from people on probation. Nor does it require ex-convicts to provide any special documentation proving their re-eligibility to vote. In practice, however, the realities are very different.
In March 2006, two think-tanks the Brennan Center for Justice and Demos released a study showing that close to 40% of New York State local election boards, including three offices in New York City, assumed (incorrectly) that probationers couldn't vote. Since there are approximately 125,000 of the state's residents on probation, this represents a massive, and illegal, diminution of the franchise.
Even more onerous, twenty of the state's sixty-three local-election boards were illegally requesting ex-felons provide documents proving they were allowed to vote. In many instances, the boards were requesting documents, such as a "release form showing that a person has paid his dues", that don't actually exist, creating a Catch-22 situation that cannot help but remove huge numbers of New Yorkers from the rights of full citizenship.
The new Jim Crow
The scale of America's prison system is, today, unprecedented. Well over 2 million Americans are either in prison or jail at any given moment, the numbers continually skewed upwards in large part because of policy decisions made during the quarter-century "war on drugs". Millions more carry with them the handicaps of a felony conviction from some point in their past. With 5% of the world's population, the United States has fully a quarter of the world's prisoners. And, unlike all other advanced democracies, America imposes political penalties on felons well after their sentences have been served.
As a result of the overlap of mass incarceration with felon disenfranchisement, America faces a contraction of the franchise on a scale seen only once before in its history during the imposition of the racist "Jim Crow" segregation laws in the late 19th century, when southern blacks were removed wholesale from the voter rolls. In an era in which the electorate is virtually dead-evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, when presidential elections are won and lost by a mere handful of votes, the removal of millions of poor, disproportionately minority citizens from the electoral process has had an all-too-tangible impact on the nation's politics.
Legal disenfranchisement on this scale is bad enough. Worse, though, is the additional disenfranchisement in states such as New York, disenfranchisement based not on the law but on rumour, misinformation and a shockingly casual approach by local election officials to the rights of their constituents.
It's high time for congress to step in and mandate states that currently practice permanent disenfranchisement to allow ex-cons to vote, at least in federal elections. In the meantime, New York and other states that, in theory, let ex-prisoners and probationers vote, need to embark on a public-education campaign to inform these citizens of their rights, and, more specifically, to bring local-election officials up to speed on how these laws operate.
