Federal Court Strikes Down Washington State’s Felon Disfranchisement Law in Landmark Voting Rights Case

Federal Court Strikes Down Washington State’s Felon Disfranchisement Law in Landmark Voting Rights Case


Stripping felons of their voting rights for life is one of many ways whites systematically deny people of color  our full humanity.  Ultimately, self-government through voting is an institutional reflection of our shared belief that all people are equal.  No person or arbitrarily defined group of people has the natural right to rule over others.  When people strip felons, who are unfairly disproportionately people of color, of their right to vote, they are claiming that the voting public (disproportionately whites) is a more valuable form of human than those who cannot participate in the governing process. 

You may have noticed that Virginia's new Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, has declared April "Confederate History Month" and instituted a new literacy test for felons (again, disproportionately minority--especially African American in Virginia) who want to regain the "right-turned-privilege" to vote.  McDonnell's literacy test requires felons to submit an essay to him as part of voting rights reinstatement proceedings.  If the Governor approves of the essay, he may choose to reinstate voting rights.  Many other states have similar systems.  When I lived in Florida, the governor could arbitrarily restore or deny voting rights to felons (after their release) based on the governor's whim.  This is the kind of thing the 1965 Voting Rights Act is designed to prevent.   These practices are only allowed to go on because they disproportionately harm people of color and greatly increase whites' voting power. 

In Florida, if released felons were allowed to vote, Al Gore would have won the state in 2000.  Among many probable consequences, former felons' votes would mean that our military would likely be home safe, and thousands of Afghan, Iraqi, and American lives would not have been lost.  How ironic that the people society is supposedly punishing for their violent pasts would have given us peace instead of the violence President Bush did in our names!