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Voting’s Outcasts: Why One in Five Blacks in Kentucky Can’t Cast a Ballot

Aura Bogado, Meta Mendel-Reyes and Voting Rights Watch 2012 on September 18, 2012 - 10:53 AM ET

One of every thirteen African-Americans are already disenfranchised, and it’s not because of voter ID laws, voter purges or cut-offs to early voting but because they’re caught up in the criminal justice system. According to a new study .. http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/fd_State_Level_Estimates_of_Felon_Disen_2010.pdf .. released this summer by the Sentencing Project, in 2010, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters were disenfranchised because they’re current or former felons. Of these, a full 75 percent were already out on parole or probation or had already completed their complete sentence. Nationwide, nearly 8 percent of African-Americans have lost their right to vote, compared to nearly 2 percent for non-African-Americans—illustrating the lasting effects of a racially biased criminal justice system.

Kentucky is one state that makes it nearly impossible for former felons to vote, and a grassroots group there has been challenging this form of disenfranchisement. If the numbers nationwide are dismal, it’s even worse in Kentucky, where nearly a quarter million people have lost their right to cast a ballot.

Meet Meta Mendel-Reyes. She’s on the Steering Committee of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth .. http://kftc.org/ , a statewide, grassroots social justice organization that seeks to restore the right of former felons to vote. She explains that former felons who have already served their time are subjected to an onerous process to attempt to get their voting rights restored—but even that process doesn’t guarantee they’ll be able to cast a ballot.

—Aura Bogado

Go to Jail, Lose Your Vote

Rev. Damon Horton wasn’t always a minister. More than a decade ago, he was a gang member, and a dealer who was arrested in 2003 and 2004 for drug trafficking. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. While Horton was incarcerated, he felt the call to the ministry. After completing 20 percent of his sentence, he was released on parole in 2006. Soon after, he married, started a family and became a minister. Yet despite turning his life around, there is one act of citizenship closed to him: he is not allowed to vote. “I can pay taxes again,” Horton says, “but I can’t vote or have a real voice in the government.”

And Horton is not alone. More than one in five African-Americans in Kentucky can’t vote because they have been convicted of a felony. In most states, after people have served their time, they are given their voting rights back. Not in Kentucky, where more than 243,000 residents have lost the right to participate in democracy.

Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor in order to have their rights restored. It’s a tricky process that takes time and doesn’t guarantee a result, partly because each governor sets up his or her own procedure during his or her tenure.

Under current Governor Steve Breshear, former felons have to wait until they have served out all their prison time, probation and parole. Then, they have to get the signature of a probation or police officer, and have that notarized. Then, their paperwork gets kicked around a bit between Corrections, the local Commonwealth Attorney and the governor. If everything goes well, the applicant can get the right to vote back in as little as sixty days.

But the Commonwealth Attorney has a lot of leeway. Some give back rights easily, while others approve only a few. Making the process even more complicated is the fact that many elections officials and corrections staff don’t know the process themselves. According to Dave Newton, KFTC organizer, “Many former felons don’t even realize that they can get their voting rights back.”

Restoration of voting rights is not only a matter of democracy. Former felons who vote are half as likely to recidivate than former felons who don’t vote. It makes sense—when a former felon feels like part of the community, he or she is less likely to act out against that community.

Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor for a pardon in order to have their voting rights restored. This makes Kentucky one of the four most difficult states, along with Virginia, Florida and Iowa, for former felons to regain their full citizenship rights.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth .. http://kftc.org/ .., a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots organization has been leading the fight to restore voting rights to former felons like Reverend Horton. House Bill 70, introduced earlier this year, would allow Kentucky voters to decide whether to grant automatic restoration of voting rights to most former felons once they have paid their debt to society (the law would exclude former felons convicted of treason, murder, sex crimes or bribery). Although the bill has passed overwhelmingly in the House, it has been stalled in the State Senate, largely due to the efforts of one hostile Committee Chairman. Sympathetic legislators plan to introduce it again in 2013.

State Senator Gerald Neal, a longtime supporter of the restoration of voting rights, eloquently asked, “Why would you give them a life sentence from democracy? It makes no sense. It’s inconsistent with our system of democracy.”

Kentucky effectively targets African-Americans, other people of color and low-income folks who will be unable to cast a ballot because of a past conviction for which they have already served their time. With an upcoming election that threatens to disenfranchise people through voter ID laws, let’s not forget the millions of former felons who have already been kept from voting.

—Meta Mendel-Reyes

For more on race and the ballot box, read Voting Rights Watch’s piece on Pennsylvania court case.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169924/racial-burdens-obscured-voter-id-laws

[..full article below..]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/170002/votings-outcasts-why-one-five-blacks-kentucky-cant-cast-ballot

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The Racial Burdens Obscured by Voter ID Laws

Brentin Mock and Voting Rights Watch 2012 on September 14, 2012 - 10:25 AM ET

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court hearing on Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, over the state’s voter ID law, was serious enough that it drew the presence of Ben Jealous, the president of the national NAACP. After ninety minutes of arguing about the fundamental right to vote before the state’s six supreme court justices, Jealous said he was “cautiously optimistic” that civil rights groups might prevail in the case.

Perhaps cautiously pessimistic, I couldn’t help but think, But what if they don’t? When I asked Jealous this, he said:

“We will have volunteers throughout the state demanding that everyone who is eligible to vote and who has a right to vote will be able to vote. And then we will make sure every provisional ballot is counted and make sure the polls stay open and we will fight to make sure the polls stay open as long as necessary.”

In other words, the NAACP, and a lot of civil rights and liberties organizations like them, would be absorbing the burden imposed by the Pennsylvania law, which mandates specific forms of photo ID in order to vote.

A lot was covered in that ninety-minute hearing, and I strongly recommend that you read Ari Berman .. http://www.thenation.com/blog/169909/nightmare-pennsylvania-voter-id-law-revisited-court .. and Philadelphia City Paper’s Daniel Denvir .. http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/nakedcity/Democratic-Supreme-Court-justices-slam-PA-voter-ID.html .. for the minutiae of what transpired in the court session.

There was a lot of argument about what constituted “the fundamental right to vote” as guaranteed by Pennsylvania’s constitution, and also how many people would be disenfranchised by the law. But at root, this hearing was about burdens, and as Gang Starr once asked, who was gonna take the weight? There were many questions about which Pennsylvanians would have to carry the extraneous burdens of this law in order to vote, and who would not. There was also debate about whether the burden was on the state or on voters to prove that those extraneous burdens even existed. When supreme court justices asked why they should overturn the lower court ruling—a huge ask—the plaintiff’s lawyer David Gersch said that “the fact people are burdened by this law triggers” their intervention.

And yet while the photo voter ID law was created on the premise that it would protect against voter fraud or unearth it, the state legislators never had the burden of having to prove that fraud actually exists—evidence of it was never entered in the court record. Governor Corbett’s lawyer Alfred Putnam Jr. said yesterday that the Commonwealth didn’t need to prove it (Also read great analysis by Pittsburgh City Paper’s Chris Potter .. http://www.pghcitypaper.com/Blogh/archives/2012/09/13/voter-id-gets-its-day-in-supreme-court ). Yet voters now have the burden—voters of color disproportionately—of complying with the law. It’s as if voters are guilty of the potential of fraud until proven innocent by an ID card.

Jealous, who enlisted the NAACP in a rally held outside the courtroom, was asked by reporters who would be hurt by the law. He said, “We fight everyday to motivate people who until the day before may not have been thinking about voting. Well this puts an entire bureaucracy between them and their vote. So now they may not be able [to vote] if they wake up that morning and decide to vote for the first time. this hurts people of color, it disproportionately hurts poor people, and it hurts working people of all colors.”

The silver lining was that some of the judges, the two liberal ones and Chief Justice Ronald Castille, asked with some frequency what would be wrong with giving a couple of years before implementing the law instead of rushing it. At one point, chief deputy attorney general for the state John Knorr conceded that the law “could be made better” if activated later rather than for this election.

But all that really did was confirm that passing the law was simply inevitable. Gersch consistently agreed with judges that while the law is terrible for 2012, that it’s at least reasonable for 2014, if not good for 2016. Election law professor Rick Hasen .. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/usa-campaign-vote-laws-idUSL1E8KBCO620120912 .. told Reuters “If you write a play you wouldn’t premier it on Broadway. If you implement a brand new law in time for the presidential election, it could just be bad.” But the state wasn’t fearful of that.

Sitting next to me was Olivia Thorne, president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania .. http://www.palwv.org/ . We got into a discussion of the early women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements. This is a thorny history, she acknowledged. Many white women at that time were fully down for the abolitionist cause in the beginning, with the understanding that they’d help African-Americans get the right to vote, and in turn everyone would push for women’s voting rights. It didn’t quite work out. Sexism among both the allies and the enemies of women suffragists drove women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton out of the abolitionist movement, and toward an unseemly racist turn. Read more about this in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Great Schism .. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-great-schism/246640/ .”

But now the LWV, inheritors of the women’s suffrage movement, are going hard in the paint for voting rights in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin and many other states—and down to the mat, when many organizations threw in the towel or decided to play the sidelines.

Thorne was in Harrisburg for the voter ID hearing, and left “disappointed” by that decision, but showed right back up for yesterday’s hearing. She spoke with me about the unique challenges faced by women and the elderly under this voter ID law, but she seemed to understand the other forces of race and class that draw additional burdens. She noted the long lines people will have to stand in on Election Day, “three to five hours in Philadelphia, but one to two hours in the suburbs,” where she said her organization works most often.

The idea of shared but unequal burdens was lost upon Pennsylvania’s lawyers and Justice Michael Eakin, one of the conservative justices. “There will never be a point where everybody can get something the legislature requires,” said Eakin. “There will always be someone left burdened” by legislation.

That may be so, but the Voting Rights Act .. http://colorlines.com/tag/Voting%20Rights%20Act .. expressly protects people of color from having to incur burdens that white Americans vote freely without. And yet now organizations like NAACP, whose members fought and died for that law, have acquired the new burden of spending time, money, shoe leather, gas and other resources to align people with the new voting rules. Our community journalist James Ceronsky .. http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/philadelphia_groups_scramble_to_help_voters_get_voter_id.html .. spent time with NAACP civic engagement director John Jordan earlier this week, who told him:

“Four years ago we were paying canvassers to do voter registration work,” he says. Now, tasked with informing voters about ID requirements in addition registering them, his organization is “pleading and begging” for volunteers in the effort to get IDs in the hands of voters.

The state’s attorney Knorr was oblivious to this. “The burden is quite minimal,” he told the judges.

“It’s minimal if you already have ID,” Judge Debra Todd snapped back.

I caught Knorr in the court hallway afterward and asked him: What if you’re wrong? What if thousands are burdened to the point of disenfranchisement on Election Day? “I can’t answer that,” he responded.

I asked Jealous the same, but he was more blunt: “If the Pennsylvania Republican leadership succeeds in stealing this election by denying people the right to vote there will be hell to pay.”

—Brentin Mock

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169924/racial-burdens-obscured-voter-id-laws

See also:

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