In the “Will Chutzpah Never Cease?” category: Watched a bit of the House debate earlier tonight on a push to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under Federal Hate Crimes legislation. And what did one Republican Congressman from Indiana have to say about it? That his constituents were probably wondering why Congress was being tied up with a divisive social issue while questions of national security were more urgent. To hear the guy, you’d never guess his party’s been trying to ammend the constitution to disenfranchise gay folks…
Tag Archives: disenfranchisement
Today Floridians vote in Democratic and Republican Senate primaries. Commissioner of Education Betty Castor, a strong progressive endorsed by MoveOn, DFA, and the UFCW – which represented the employees of the University she served as President – has a commanding lead over Congressman Peter Deutsch, who’s been painting her as soft on terror and bashing Emily’s List as sexist for endorsing her, and Mayor Alex Pinelas, who refused in 2000 to endorse Al Gore or object to his constituents disenfranchisement at the polls. Most importantly, Castor has the intrepid support of my friend Val Baron. On the Republican side, former Congressman Bill McCollum has a couple-point lead on former Bush HUD Secretary Mel Martinez, who’s been attacking McCollum from the far right on gay marriage for supporting hate crime legislation. I’m confident Castor can take on either one.
Errol says that while I haven’t convinced him
that felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional, irrational, or undemocratic, I am convinced that the purging of elible voters from voting rolls because the state is too lazy to double-check a list is all of those things.
Whichever side you fall on on the first question, this is good news for those concerned with constitutionality, rationality, and democracy:
Florida’s top election officials conceded Tuesday that they will take no legal action to force the state’s 67 election supervisors to remove nearly 48,000 voters who have been identified by the state as potentially ineligible to vote. This means the fate of these voters, some of whom appear to have been wrongly placed on the list, will be up to the election supervisor in each county, many of whom have been hesitant so far to remove any voter from the rolls. Some supervisors have said they were unsure if they had the time or staff needed to independently verify the background of voters prior to this fall’s elections, but other supervisors have moved ahead anyway.
Hesitant they should be.
In a victory for transparency and democracy, a judge in Leon County has ordered the release of Florida’s list of felons to purge from the rolls:
Florida’s error-prone list of 47,763 suspected felons who could be tossed from voter rolls before November’s presidential election contains nearly three times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Almost half are racial minorities…Circuit Judge Nikki Ann Clark said in her ruling that the Florida Constitution “grants every person the fundamental right to inspect or copy public records.” Further, the state had previously allowed the public and news media to inspect the list and not make copies, but Clark cited previous state court rulings that said the public’s access was “valueless without the right to make copies.”…Among racial groups, the largest reported group was non-Hispanic whites with 24,197, followed by 22,084 non-Hispanic blacks, 1,384 unknowns, 61 Hispanics, 14 Asian or Pacific-Islanders, 12 American Indians and 11 others. The list consisted of 37,777 men and 9,986 women.
Mistakenly purging eligible voters from the rolls was among the state’s biggest stumbles in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, which decided the presidency by 537 votes. The list included voters who had never been convicted of crimes, some whose rights had been restored by other states and others whose names matched those of felons. Nobody knows how many valid voters were disenfranchised. In response to those errors, the state asked the counties to verify the list in advance of elections and, if they could not, to remove questionable voters from the rolls. Florida is one of just seven states where felons must petition to regain voting rights after serving their time. Counties must issue letters to voters who could be declared ineligible. Only those who can prove they’re eligible to vote will be left on the rolls. Secretary of State Glenda Hood said in a statement announcing the release of the information that it contains potential matches and is not a final list.
To describe the 2000 purge as “mistaken” is misleading at best. As Greg Palast wrote recently:
This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures. Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It’s not surprising that the First Brother’s team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled. The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. That’s not surprising. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.
Releasing the lists is a vital step in stopping the whitewashing of the voter rolls from proceeding as planned again. In the meantime, Bush and company are scoring double victories by convincing all too many of those we’re out in Tampa pressing to register to vote that it isn’t worth it because, as many have put it, “They don’t count the votes – they just put whoever they want in there anyway.”
America Coming Together Spokesman Jim Jordan on hiring felons:
Given that the president and the vice president have three DUI arrests between them, we assume that they both believe in forgiveness and second chances.
It’s a funny comment, but there’s a very serious point to be made about the classed and racialized construction of felons by media and political elites who themselves benefit from the sickening double standards towards crime in this country. For the Bushes and Cheneys, second, and third, and fourth chances will always be available, as will be the chance to condescend to those with far less agregious crimes and only empty promises when it comes to rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
More on felons and the political process: The Associated Press apparently did some research, discovered that America Coming Together (ACT), one of the largest national groups sending canvassers out to register and educate voters for the election, had hired some former felons, and they were shocked – just shocked. ACT’s response, to their credit, has been defending its policy:
We believe it’s important to give people a second chance,” Elleithee said. “The fact that they are willing to do this work is a fairly serious indication that they want to become productive members of society.”
RNC Chair Ed Gillespie, shamefully but unsurprisingly, is claiming that having been convicted of a felony should disqualify Americans from handling official documents with private information. His essential contention – that the democratic process is too pure to be sullied by the involvement of those with crimminal records – should be all too familiar to those who saw it marshalled by a slew of dKos posters to defend Arizona’s disenfranchisement of felons in the name of keeping Nader off the ballot.
More power to ACT for hiring everyone who’s prepared and qualified for the hard, urgent work of empowering people to make demands of our democracy. I know I’ve found few people as excited about that work here in Florida as those felons who’ve been purged from the process. Everyone (almost) claims to want to see those who’ve served their time productively and smoothly reintegrated into society. Except not into my neighborhood. Not into my workplace. Not into my democracy.
A Dkos poster replies to me:
If you think drug laws are unfair, work to change the drug laws so that drug offenders are no longer convicted felons.
But don’t let convicted felons have a position of fiduciary trust in the voting process. Let them have jobs, apartments, let them vote, yes. If this bothers you, ask yourself: would you want a convicted felon (and I don’t mean a drug offender; I mean a child molester, white-collar criminal, or gunpoint robber) to be president? I wouldn’t. Sure, maybe his rehibilitation made him especially wise, but I wouldn’t want to take a chance. The risk is just too great. And where did Nader or the firm he hired find 19 convicted felons to put on payroll? Did they recruit especially for that demographic?
Would I vote for a convicted felon for President? Well, it would depend on what his platform was, who he was running against, and (to a lesser extent) the circumstances under which he became a convicted felon. Would I want to be denied the chance to vote for that candidate by having him purged from the ballot? Sure as hell not, no matter who he is.
For those who don’t know, the proportion of convicted felons among young men of color in many communities in this country – including some here in Florida, where I’ve been registering voters the past few weeks – is as high as one in four. So no, you don’t have to be looking to find them. As for fiduciary trust, there’s no justification for barring felons as a class (and let’s be honest about the size and demographic of the class we’re talking about) from working for the government, from voting, or from working to give those who desire the chance to exercise their democratic right to sign their name to a petition. What the process needs is oversight of signatures as they come in, not purges of the people who collect them.
An outrageous and deeply cynical comment by Kos, who should know better:
In addition to suspect signatures, entire reams of signatures can be invalidated if the person collecting them is a felon. Turns out that out of the 122 paid people who gathered the Nader signatures, at least 19 are confirmed felons. One of them was convicted for forgery. Considering that these same felonious petitioners were also soliciting signatures for an anti-immigrant initiative and an effort to invalidate Arizona’s clean election law, invalidating those petitioners and their signatures may actually serve triple duty, helping defeat Nader’s cynical presidential effort AND two nasty Republican-backed ballot efforts.
Not much new to say about this. Voting for Ralph Nader is, I firmly believe the wrong choice for someone concerned with progressive change in this country to make, and overlooks the tremendous difference between the greater and lesser of the two evils for those most directly affected by government policy be it creating jobs, protecting the right to organize, keeping bigotry out of the constitution, or sustaining the earth. But how should Kerry supporters respond? By organizing voters behind the Democratic candidate, and organizing the candidate behind a progressive agenda which co-opts Nader’s issues rather than demeaning his supporters. Not by drawing from the other side’s playbook by seeking out ways to disenfranchise voters by narrowing their democratic choices. Kos, unfortunately does this and descends one step further by lauding Democrats for taking advantage of this country’s abysmal treatment of former convicts, a group whose make-up (in case Kos has forgotten) is disproportionately minority, disproportionately poor, and shamefully swelled with first-time non-violent drug offenders. Felon disenfranchisement is the closest parallel this country maintains to a poll tax. Progressives should be working to undo it, not to exploit it for electoral gambits.
Governor Jeb Bush yesterday restored the civil right of voting to only 22,000 previously disenfranchised felons out of 150,000 included in a suit against the state demanding restoration of rights. The ACLU estimates the number of disenfranchised felons in Florida at 600,000. So what happened yesterday was progress, but not nearly enough of it.
Deeply problematic arguments have always been marshaled and sold in defense of disenfranchising felons. The value to which Americans – explicitly or implicitly – appeal in staking out such a position, as the ninth circuit appeals court observed, is often a conception of “the purity of the ballot box” as a state interest worth defending – or otherwise, as Keyssar argues in The Right to Vote, “a general pronouncement that a state has an interest in preventing persons who have been convicted of serious crimes from participation…” Such reasoning describes Judge Friendly’s defense of states’ prerogative “that perpetrators of serious crimes shall not take part in electing the legislators who make the laws…the prosecutors who must try them…or the judges who are to consider their cases.” Friendly’s argument is immediately sympathetic, and seems eminently reasonable. It is, however, profoundly undemocratic.
For democracy to be “the worst system except for the all the other ones” demands a faith – a gamble – that more times than not, the decisions of a large group of human beings will be better for them than the decisions of any select group or individual chosen from among them without their consent. Democracy is, at best, a medium which brings the will of the people (however determined or constructed) into power as the policy which governs the people. If pure is a meaningful term in reference to democracy, it must refer to how representative we judge the process – not how desirable we find the result. Purity, as the 9th court references it, however, is a subversive undercurrent in the debate: the purity of the voters who take part in the process. Pure democracy, in these terms, is a democracy in which the morally pure cast the votes. This is – unless the impure have been expunged from society entirely – not democracy at all.
Friendly appeals to an intuitive sense that the views of criminals don’t belong in formation of policy on the criminal justice system. The assumption, presumably, is that criminals have vested interests in certain policy results. But our voting booths, unlike our juries, demand no assumption of neutrality. Rather, democracy is a struggle between interests. Friendly’s argument implies, clearly, that criminals have self-serving interests that would, if realized, be detrimental to society as a whole. This too, however, is not nor should be a barrier to voting in the American system. Klansmen are as free to vote against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act as CEOs are to vote against overtime protections. Much as Franklin asked why going from the moment of having a donkey to the moment of not having a donkey should change the worth of someone’s vote, we must ask why going from possessing a burning desire to murder and being unable to follow through to successfully committing the act should have such an effect. Had Friendly argued in his opinion that American policy should be made by those who are pure, it would be much less frequently cited and much more intuitively off-putting. It would rightly raise the specter of campaigns for purity throughout American history, and the tremendous damage they wrought to the welfare of countless people and to the legitimacy of our democracy.
There are severe negative consequences to disenfranchising felons – removing those most affected by criminal justice policy from the political discourse denies them the primary avenue available to reform it. This creates a vicious cycle in which bad policy can systematically disenfranchise communities while denying them the vote and the voice with which to reverse it. Considering which Americans are in fact losing the franchise for felonies, for felony convictions, or for false records – as Greg Palast documents in the case of Florida – of felonies, suggests that this is more than an idle prospect. Overwhelmingly, such policy is denying the vote not to the theoretical cold-blooded murderer of the hypothetical, but to legions of working-class people of color, most for drug-possession, reinforcing the stratification of wealth and power which distinguishes the modern United States.
Registering voters in low-income neighborhoods here in Tampa has provided me a powerful reminder of just how many people are forced out of the process by felonies for which they’ve already served time, and just how how unrepresentative a sample of America these disenfranchised voters are. No one we talk to here is more adamant about the urgency of voting than the ex-felons who can’t, or more critical of those who insist that there’s no point in voting. It’s frustrating to be able to offer little more than a form to apply for executive clemency – a process which, as we saw yesterday, leaves much to be desired – and demanded.
(Cross-posted at Undernews)
Josh Eidelson 