Restore the Vote for Returning Citizens

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
—Shirley Chisholm, America’s first black woman elected to US Congress

Restore the Vote for Returning Citizens

Grant Ferguson, a blue-eyed, clean-shaven sales manager in Iowa, was taken aback when a sheriff ’s deputy arrived with a warrant for his arrest.

Even more shocking was the reason why. According to an AP report, Ferguson “was stunned when he learned the reason: his unsuccessful attempt to vote in the 2016 election. The supporter of President Donald Trump would ultimately face $5,000 in legal costs to resolve the charges, which stemmed from a bureaucratic error that unknowingly kept him on Iowa’s list of ineligible felon voters.” Iowa is unforgiving when it comes to ex-felons casting ballots, the report said, and prosecutors pursue cases relentlessly:

“A Clinton [Iowa] man who is disabled from a brain injury was prosecuted after he mistakenly believed poll workers would alert him if there was a problem with his voting eligibility. A low-income Muscatine man who cast a provisional ballot after disputing that he was ineligible still owes $2,300 in court costs. The mayor of tiny Moorhead was forced to resign and prosecuted for illegally voting after a judge revoked his deferred judgment in a drug case.”

Prosecutors pursued cases even when ex-offenders such as Ferguson believed they were legal voters but cast provisional ballots so that their eligibility could be determined later.11

In many of these cases, the ex-felons did not intend to break the law, and they may have even been trying to hedge their bets by casting a provisional ballot because they were unsure whether they were eligible to vote (as in Ferguson’s case). Sometimes the state’s felon list isn’t updated, or local precincts haven’t checked the state’s list for updates, causing errors in who is allowed to vote.

Some states, following the lead of Jeb Bush in Florida’s 2000 election, use these mistakes to purge the voter rolls of convicted felons and anyone who shares a similar name with a convicted felon. In the case of Kris Kobach’s Crosscheck crusade against nonexistent voter fraud, secretaries of state have purged individuals from the rolls even when they had a middle initial that was different from a convicted felon’s and regardless of whether the two individuals had different Social Security numbers.

As covered earlier, in many states—such as Texas and Florida—individuals with criminal records are disproportionately black or Hispanic, and the Republican Party has been very successful in making sure that they can’t vote. In Florida, a swing state, fully 21 percent of African American men can’t vote (as of 2018) because of a felony conviction.12

The For the People Act of 2019 goes a step beyond automatic voter registration when an individual turns 18—it would also require states to automatically register ex-felons when their sentence is complete, upon release. Right now, 12 states (five in the South) ban automatic voter restoration once felons have completed their sentence.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has called the bill “a solution in search of a problem”—but in the cases of Grant Ferguson and dozens of others in Iowa, automatic restoration of voting rights would have saved them an arrest, lost wages, time in court, and a hefty fine.

For Americans like Grant Ferguson—who has served his time and is seeking to participate in American democracy— the problem of voter suppression and inconsistent local and federal laws have costly consequences.

Once a citizen has served his or her time for a crime and is deemed rehabilitated to reintegrate into society, it should be considered essential to reintegration that that citizen be able to participate in our democracy and exercise his or her right to vote.

Certainly, if a citizen has committed no crime aside from having a name similar to that of a criminal, it is a major problem if he or she is purged from the voter rolls, as happened in Florida in 2000.

Taking it a step further, Bernie Sanders pointed out during a town hall in May 2019 that Vermont is one of two states in the union (Maine is the other) that lets felons vote while in jail.

While the idea of such a thing going national quickly became an object of ridicule, the most important point is lost. We say that we think of felons as human beings whom we are working to redeem and reintegrate into society.

What better way to reintegrate a person into society than giving the person a choice in selecting his or her representatives and sometimes even voting on ballot measures that may become law?