With voter registration deadlines looming, organizers step up efforts to add ex-felons to the rolls
Community organizers across Florida are working hard this election season to register former felons after Florida changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts.
From the New York Times:
Felony disenfranchisement - often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests - affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods.
National rights groups such as the ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, and the Sentencing Project and have been working to overturn felon disenfranchisement laws and to restore voting rights to former convicts for years. The changing laws in states such as Florida mean that thousands of formerly ineligible voters will be able to vote in the upcoming elections, yet many former felons are unaware and uninformed of the reinstatement of their right to vote. With this new surge of potential voters, grassroots organizers have their hands full just trying to get the word out.
"You're talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don't even know it," Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way, told the New York Times. In Florida, "we're talking tens of thousands of people," he added. "And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference."
Even with the laws changed, there are still many hurdles to getting ex-felons back on the rolls in Florida. The NYT reports:
Despite the state's liberalization of felony voter procedures, only 9,000 out of a potential 112,000 former convicts in Florida registered to vote in the last year, according to a report last month in The Orlando Sentinel. Part of the reason is that thousands of notifications sent by the state went to the wrong addresses because of poor data and former prisoners' high mobility.
Fred Schuknecht, the director of administration for the Florida Clemency Board, acknowledged in an interview that there was a backlog of 60,000 former felons who could potentially have their rights restored, but must first be reviewed by the agency. Despite the fact that 3,500 newly released prisoners are added to the caseload every month, the Legislature cut 20 percent of the staff devoted to felony voter restoration cases, Mr. Schuknecht said.
According to the ACLU, this is current status of disenfranchisement laws:
Maine and Vermont are the only two states that allow prisoners, parolees and probationers to vote. Parolees and probationers can vote in 13 states, while eight states reinstate the voting rights of those on probation. Twenty states restore voting rights to those who have finished serving out their sentences, with varying degrees of limits and regulations. Virginia and Kentucky permanently strip away the rights of almost all felons.
Elsewhere across the nation, civil rights groups and community organizers are also hard at work trying to get the word out to ex-felons. Facing South previously reported on the surge in ex-offenders seeking a restoration of their voting rights in Tennessee. The Memphis Chapter of the NAACP is continuing to offer free assistance to Tennessee ex-felons who want to restore their voting rights.
Other states continue to see a resurgence of applications as well. In Virginia, the number of nonviolent felons who applied to have their voting rights restored, and were approved by the governor, have increased 33% leading up to this year's presidential election compared to the 2004 election, reports the Virginia Daily Press. The Virginia Organizing Project is one of several organizations pushing to inform felons how to get their rights restored. While knocking on doors across Virginia, many people told canvassers they don't have the right to vote because they're felons. Now the organization is working to get people correctly informed about the law and to assist felons in applying to the governor to have their civil rights restored.
In other voting restoration news this week, the ACLU and ACLU of Mississippi filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the state's denial of voting rights to citizens with felony convictions. Although the Mississippi Constitution permits people who have been convicted of a crime to vote for president and vice president, election administrators are denying that right in practice, according to an ACLU press release.
