Felony disenfranchisement is a major issue to us. Al Gore would be our President today if Floridian felons had the vote back then. Rebecca Perl of the Center for Investigative Reporting has a new article in the Nation on this single largest group of citizens banned from voting.

Felons and former felons are the single largest group barred by law from voting in the US. Most states passed disenfranchisement laws after the Civil War when blacks were first gaining the right to vote. Prisoners never lose their right to vote in twenty countries across Europe. Eighty percent of Americans favor restoring the right to vote to ex-prisoners who have completed their sentences. If felons had the vote in 2000, Al Gore would have won the popular vote by more than a million votes.

....Civil rights advocates predict that voting rights for prisoners and ex-prisoners will be the next US suffrage movement, as lawyers, prison advocates, voting rights groups and foundations have recently begun to join forces and take up the cause. "The United States, this great democracy, was founded as this experiment, and it was a great experiment. But it was a very limited one as well," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a prison advocacy group in Washington, DC. "At the time the country was founded, essentially a group of wealthy white men granted themselves the right to vote." Mauer says that today, we look back on that decision with some degree of national embarrassment, and our history since then has been one of trying to open the franchise.

For more, see Whose Vote Counts? Our prior writings on the topic are accessible here.

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