Human Rights Watch wrote letters to US Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Mitch McConnel, Charles Schumer and Sam Brownback in wchich HRW commend their sponsorship of federal legislation to support improvements in voting procedures.HRW is concerned that the legislation as currently proposed ignores the greatest flaw in the nation's electoral process: the disenfranchisement of at least 1.4 million ex-felons. This serious infringement of the right to vote is documented in the enclosed report published in 1998 by Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project, "Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement laws in the United States."
Unreliable voting machines, burdensome registration procedures, confusing ballots: none of these are as much of an assault on the nation's commitment to democracy than the laws in the thirteen states that prohibit men and women convicted of crimes from voting in state or federal elections even after they have served their sentences and have rejoined society. They may be hard working, tax paying, law-abiding people, but they remain cast out of the national body politic. As one ex-felon noted, "without a vote, I am a ghost inhabiting a citizen's space."
The electoral impact of the disenfranchisement of ex-felons is significant. Indeed, in Florida the outcome of the presidential election was affected more by the disenfranchisement laws than by hanging chads and baffling butterfly ballots: more than 400,000 ex-offenders in Florida were denied the vote.
No other democratic country in the world denies as many people - in absolute or proportionate terms - the right to vote because of prior felony convictions. The extent of disenfranchisement is even more disturbing given that the right to vote can be lost for relatively minor offenses such as shoplifting. In the states that disenfranchise ex-felons, an eighteen-year-old first-time offender who receives probation upon conviction for a single sale of drugs faces a lifetime of disenfranchisement.
The racial impact of disenfranchisement laws is particularly troubling. In seven states, at least one in four black men is disenfranchised as an ex-felon. In Florida and Alabama, the number soars to one in three. Given current rates of incarceration, 40 percent of the next generation of African American men is likely to be permanently disenfranchised.
Disenfranchisement laws are a vestige of medieval times when offenders were banished from the community and suffered "civil death." Brought from Europe to the colonies, they gained new political salience at the end of the nineteenth century when disgruntled whites in many Southern states adopted them and other ostensibly race-neutral voting restrictions in an effort to exclude blacks from the vote.
State laws that govern voting in federal as well as state elections form of national "crazy-quilt." The right to vote in federal elections is thus subject to the arbitrary accidents of geography. A person convicted of theft in New Jersey, for example, automatically regains the right to vote after release from prison, while a person convicted of the same crime in New Mexico is denied the vote forever unless a pardon can be secured from the state governor.
The disenfranchisement of ex-felons serves no discernible legitimate purpose. To the contrary, it arbitrarily denies ex-offenders the ability to vote regardless of the nature of their crimes or the severity of their sentences. It distorts the country's electoral process and diminishes the black vote, countering decades of voting rights gains.
We urge you to include within any federal aid to states to modernize their voting systems a condition that no such aid can be granted to states that retain the most damaging electoral anachronism of all - the denial of the franchise to ex-offenders.
