What Happens When States Restore Voting Rights To Former Felons Talking Points Memo 2 hrs ago Rachel Mitchell has l

[size=36] What Happens When States Restore Voting Rights To Former Felons [/size]

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What Happens When States Restore Voting Rights To Former Felons Talking Points Memo 2 hrs ago Rachel Mitchell has l AAAF8pm

What Happens When States Restore Voting Rights To Former Felons Talking Points Memo 2 hrs ago Rachel Mitchell has l AAAF8pm

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One of the Scott administration’s reasons for automatically disenfranchising former felons is that this is just the way things work in Florida.

“Florida’s clemency process is outlined in Florida’s Constitution and has been in place under multiple gubernatorial administrations,” the governor’s press secretary, Ashley Cook, told me in a statement.

But many other U.S. states used to have similarly restrictive policies blocking those with felony convictions from the franchise. Then they loosened them. No wave of voter fraud or spike in crime or blue tsunami of Democratic votes followed.

But these new voters’ did manage to make an impact on the outcome of local elections. Take Virginia. Until 2013, the Old Dominion operated under a felon disenfranchisement provision that dated to the nineteenth century. Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell ended the policy of permanently disenfranchising all residents with felony convictions, restoring rights to those with non-violent records who complied with various restrictions.

From 2014 onwards, McDonnell’s successor, Terry McAuliffe, rolled out a series of measures to further streamline the process. That included a series of spring 2016 executive orders restoring the franchise to those who completed their terms of incarceration and supervised release. Under McAuliffe’s tenure, over 168,000 former felons got their voting rights back.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that his executive orders violated the state constitution, which stipulates that the governor has to restore clemency on a case-by-case basis. But the 2016 and 2017 elections in Virginia saw dozens of moving stories of residents with felony convictions voting for the first time — some 40,000 registered ahead of the 2017 election.

“I now felt like a citizen. I now felt like I will make a difference in some kind of way. Just bubbling in them little circles, it’s like power, it’s power,” LaVaughn Williams told the Huffington Post last fall. And not only did they have a chance to participate in a key election for the state, many of these ex-felons said they no longer felt that their convictions barred them from being seen as valued members of society.

Williams learned about the change in Virginia’s policy because a local voting rights organization told her about it.

This was one of my major takeaway’s from reporting this story: Changes in felon disenfranchisement laws only matter if states — and, if that fails, grassroots groups — properly educate affected voters about the changes.

As one 2014 study published in the “Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science” noted, “An ex-felon may find it challenging to learn whether he or she is eligible to vote because of both the fragmented nature of criminal disenfranchisement policy and the complexity of specific states’ disenfranchisement laws.”

“Legal disenfranchisement is only one channel through which criminal disenfranchisement affects ex-felon turnout at the polls,” the authors continued. “A number of policies, such as notification, can affect the participation rates of the formerly disenfranchised.”

The smoothest, most effective way to ensure that those affected benefit is to notify them in clear, brief, personally-addressed letters sent at times of “heightened political interest,” the study found.

This article was written by Allegra Kirkland from Talking Points Memo and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.