Voting rights urged for ex-inmates

“The governor believes that when an individual commits a felony, it is fair they earn their rights back by paying restitution to their victim, court costs, and fines.”

Attorney General Eric Holder called Tuesday for 11 states to restore voting rights to ex-felons, part of a push to fix what he sees as flaws in the criminal justice system that have a disparate impact on racial minorities.

“It is time to fundamentally rethink laws that permanently disenfranchise people who are no longer under federal or state supervision,” Holder said, targeting 11 states that he said continue to restrict voting rights for former inmates, even after they have finished their prison terms — in particular Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia, which bar felons from the polls for life unless they receive clemency from the governor.

“Across this country today, an estimated 5.8 million Americans — 5.8 million of our fellow citizens — are prohibited from voting because of current or previous felony convictions,” Holder told a symposium on criminal justice at Georgetown University.

Studies show that felons who have been denied the right to vote are far more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans. In 2002, scholars at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University concluded that the 2000 presidential election “would almost certainly have been reversed” had felons been allowed to vote.

Holder said Tuesday that 2.2 million black citizens, or nearly one in 13 African-American adults, are banned from voting because of unduly harsh policies.

“Although well over a century has passed since post-Reconstruction states used these measures to strip African-Americans of their most fundamental rights, the impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable,” he said.

In addition to Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia, the states the Justice Department has identified as restricting voting rights are Arizona, Alabama, I Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Wyoming and Tennessee. On the positive side, Holder said 23 states, including Nebraska, Nevada, Texas and Washington, have enacted recent improvements.

Reaction was swift. In Iowa, which in recent years rescinded automatic restoration of ex-prisoners’ voting rights, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad “believes that when an individual commits a felony, it is fair they earn their rights back by paying restitution to their victim, court costs, and fines,” said Jimmy Centers, Branstad’s spokesman.

The call for restoring the vote to prisoners is the latest result of a review Holder ordered a year ago to find areas in the Justice Department’s mission that needed change.

The first initiative came last August, when he instructed federal prosecutors to stop charging many nonviolent drug defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences. He said long mandatory terms have flooded the nation’s prisons with low-level drug offenders and diverted money from crime fighting.

A month ago, Holder joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan in pressing the nation’s schools to abandon disciplinary policies that send students to court instead of the principal’s office. And last weekend, Holder applied a landmark Supreme Court opinion to the Justice Department, declaring same-sex spouses are entitled to the same rights and privileges as federal prison inmates in opposite-sex marriages.

Though conservative have often opposed Holder, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., agrees with him, at least in part, on the felon voting rights issue. Paul, a civil libertarian and possible presidential candidate, has said bans on non-violent felon voting dwarf all election-related issues.