Schools, town halls, and even legislative chambers are feeling increasingly uneasy these days, besieged by an onslaught of racist hostility. Yet civil rights activists are working to open up new space for democracy in one of the least friendly corners of the country.
NAACP President Benjamin Jealous made a bold gesture on Tuesday by campaigning to get out the vote behind bars. The organization registered voters (along with new NAACP members) at several prison facilities in Maine.
The choice of location in part reflected Jealous's family ties, but was mainly due to the fact that Maine is one of only two states that officially enable people with felony convictions to vote from inside prison (the other is Vermont). Other states have enacted a patchwork of laws that constrain people's access to the ballot based on past convictions. Some states extend voting bans long after a person is released. In some areas, arduous re-enfranchisement procedures quietly exclude the formerly incarcerated from the electorate indefinitely.
Despite piecemeal reforms, in total, the government “bars 5.3 million Americans -- or one in forty-one adults -- from voting due to a criminal conviction, most of which are non-violent in nature,” according to a report filed this month with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by the Sentencing Project, the ACLU, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The groups not that disenfranchisement policies affect over 8 percent of the Black population, “a rate three times the national average.”
