Ex-felon disenfranchisement and the struggle for voting rights

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/4/2007/1527

Ex-felon disenfranchisement and the struggle for voting rights
April 18, 2007

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, lawmakers who opposed African American voting rights desperately considered ways to remove large numbers of blacks from their state’s electorates without appearing to violate their constitutional rights. In the 1960s, many southern and some western states figured out how to accomplish this: by passing state constitutional provisions, or state laws, barring individuals convicted of a felony from voting for the remainder of their lives. Since African Americans were disproportionately prosecuted and convicted of felonies in most state courts, the loss of voting rights would hit blacks hardest.

This racist scheme – using the criminal justice system not to "rehabilitate" prisoners, but to strip them of their democratic voting rights for life – was successful. In 1968, Florida barred ex-offenders from voting for life. By 2000, approximately 818,000 Florida residents who had prior felony convictions, but who were no longer incarcerated, were disenfranchised. The vast majority of this disenfranchised population was African-American. None of these citizens were permitted to vote in Florida’s contested 2000 presidential election, which George W. Bush narrowly "won" by only hundreds of votes.