Study Says State Felon Voting Bans Deliberately Anti-Black

By Bill Alexander, BET.com Staff Writer

Posted July 7, 2004 – Jim Crow-like voter disfranchisement laws established to thwart the “menace of Negro domination” during Reconstruction are still in place in states with large African American electorates, a new study says.

The report cites Florida, Georgia, Texas, Virginia and Kentucky among the states where recent close elections for the U.S. Senate (and the 2000 presidential race) went to Republican candidates, in part because of restrictive felon disenfranchisement laws that deny former felons, probationers and parolees the right to vote.

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“In the wake of the Civil War, states and municipalities enacted a wide range of Black Codes and later Jim Crow laws to minimize the political power of newly enfranchised African Americans,” it says.

By 1920, three-fourths of the states banned ex-felons from voting.

Today, according to the D.C.-based Sentencing Project, almost all states have disenfranchisement laws that have “significantly affected the political voice of many American communities.”

Sentencing Project research reveals that:

Some 1.4 million African American men -- 13 percent of all Black men in the country – are disenfranchised currently or permanently, representing seven times the national average. Disenfranchised Black women number some 245,000, or more than one in 50 of the Black women in America.

In six of the seven states that deny the vote to ex-offenders (Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, Iowa), one in four Black men is permanently disenfranchised.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated (Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote); 35 states prohibit felons from voting while they’re on parole, and 31 of the 35 exclude felony probationers as well.

Of the 1.7 million Black and White disenfranchised ex-offenders nationwide who had completed their sentences but were unable to vote in 2000, Florida alone had at least 600,000 citizens who were unable to vote in the Bush-Gore presidential election. Nearly 40 percent of those Floridians were Black.

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