The Voting Effect of Virginia’s Move on Felons? Small but Potentially Decisive

The Voting Effect of Virginia’s Move on Felons? Small but Potentially Decisive

by Nate Cohn at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/upshot/the-voting-effect-of-virginias-move-on-felons-surprisingly-small.html?_r=0

"SNIP............


There was considerable fretting — or satisfaction — over Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s decision Friday to re-enfranchise 200,000 ex-felons in Virginia.

The state will be one of the central battlegrounds this November, and it is widely believed that ex-felons will vote heavily for Democrats. (More than half are African-Americans, a big voting bloc for the party.) And the big number of newly enfranchised voters is actually larger than Mr. Obama’s 149,298-vote margin of victory there in 2012.

But the electoral effect of felon re-enfranchisement is likely to be modest. The best-case scenario for Democrats might be that they improve their popular vote margin by a half-point. That’s a big deal, but only in a close election.

The reason is deceptively straightforward. Ex-felons are less likely to vote than nonfelons, even when ex-felons are eligible to vote.



.............SNIP"