If these people have their way Marion Barry will be the President of the United States some day.
Felon Voters
A growing movement.
By David Lampo
hould murderers, rapists, and thieves regain the right to vote once they've served their time? As hard as it is to believe, in 32 states they already do. Only 13 states now forbid convicted felons from voting, with just nine of these imposing lifetime bans. Two states, Vermont and Maine, even allow felons currently doing time to vote like any other citizen. If you think there's something wrong with letting murderers, rapists, and thieves help determine public policy, listen up, because the movement to restore voting rights to felons is growing, led mostly by African-American politicians and liberal reform groups, and it's coming to a state legislature near you.
Maryland is the latest battleground, where a bill to restore voting rights to twice-convicted felons passed both houses of the legislature. The state's governor, Democrat Parris Glendening, has promised he will sign it. The bill allows such felons to apply for restoration of their right to vote three years after their release. Maryland already allows those convicted of one felony to vote after their prison term and parole are completed. Just last year, Connecticut Republican Gov. John G. Rowland signed a bill that will allow convicted felons on probation to vote beginning this year. It's not just the states without voting rights that will be targeted. Even states with limited voting rights will be targeted because they now exclude violent offenders or repeat felons.
Like many other criminal-justice issues, this one has overtly racial overtones because of the simple fact that of the nearly four million felons currently denied the right to vote, more than a third are black. In fact, nearly 13 percent of black men nationwide have lost the right to vote because they are convicted felons, and in some states, the percentage is much higher. In Florida, one of the states that has a lifetime ban on voting by felons, a third of all black men are ineligible to vote. In Virginia, another state with a lifetime ban, a quarter of black men are ineligible.
Instead of confronting the fact that a grossly disproportionate amount of crime is committed by black men, however, certain black leaders have turned it around and used it as yet another example of supposed institutionalized white racism, with some actually comparing the loss of voting rights for felons to poll taxes and Jim Crow voting restrictions in the old South. Typical of this line of reasoning is Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a liberal policy group in Washington, D.C. "Fifty years after the beginning of the civil rights movement," he writes, "it is tragic that every day more black citizens lose their voting rights. This is not just a criminal-justice issue, but one of basic democracy." Of course, he conveniently forgot to add that any convicted felon, white, or black, loses the right to vote in those states that forbid it. One would think that those who actually suffered at the hands of Jim Crow would consider it a moral obscenity to be compared to murderers and rapists, but the silence is deafening.
Besides the various state efforts, there is also federal legislation (of course) to restore voting rights introduced by Rep. John Conyers from Michigan. His bill, with the Orwellian title of "The Civic Participation and Rehabilitation Act," would preempt state laws by mandating the restoration of voting rights to all felons once they've served their prison time. Rep. Conyers and other black Democrats in particular have used the close 2000 presidential election, particularly in Florida, as proof of the "disenfranchisement" of black voters in general, lumping together convicted felons with those poor souls simply unable to operate a voting machine. There are many heads, you see, to this monster of white racism. Conyers's bill has the support of all the usual suspects, including the NAACP, the ACLU, the National Council of Churches, the National Urban League, and Human Rights Watch.
The continuing emphasis on this issue by Democrats shows its great importance to them. It's clearly not lost on Democrat leaders that if just a fraction of those felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Al Gore would now be sitting in the White House. In fact, a report issued in 2000 by Professors Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza from Northwestern University showed that if felons nationwide had been allowed to vote between 1972 and 1998, at least five Republican Senate candidates who won would have been defeated. "In every case, the Democratic candidate was hurt by disenfranchisement," Prof. Uggen stated. He and Manza also said they estimate that about a quarter of currently ineligible felons would be likely to vote in a presidential election. That means about a million more votes for the Democrat.
Now one can certainly make a case that nonviolent felons should be treated differently than murderers and rapists. After all, one can hardly compare a nonviolent drug offense for marijuana use, let's say, with a felony theft or murder conviction. Many conservatives with a libertarian streak have long made the distinction between violent crime and victimless crime, and properly so. But this movement to restore voting rights to felons by and large doesn't make that distinction. It's much more important to the movement's leaders to simply elect more Democrats.
The obvious question is, what are Republicans going to do about this? Although federal legislation is unlikely to gain much Republican support, there seems to be little organized opposition to this movement at the state level except for victims-rights groups. There is little apparent outrage in the Republican party, which is sometimes too eager to attract more minority voters at the expense of principles and common sense. When Republican Gov. Rowland signed that Connecticut bill, for example, "he didn't sign it with any political considerations," said aide Dean Pagani. That's quite obvious. Unfortunately, the Democrats are not nearly so naïve.
— David Lampo is a freelance writer and conservative activist in Alexandria, Virginia.
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