Why Five Million Americans Won't Be Voting

When Americans go to the polls Nov. 2, five million among us won't be invited.

The reason is a patchwork of state laws disenfranchising people with criminal records. And although a new report from the Sentencing Project finds progress over the last decade (800,000 people got the vote in 24 states thanks to reforms), there's still work to do. Challenges to felon disenfranchisement laws have had a rough few weeks in the federal courts, and millions of people who have finished their sentences -- many of them poor -- are still without the right to vote.

The New York Times championed voting rights for felons in an editorial this week: "Democracy is strengthened when as many citizens as possible have the right to vote. Fully integrating ex-offenders back into society is also the best way to encourage their lasting rehabilitation."

A series of decisions in the Washington state case Farrakhan v. Gregoire had given activists hope that state and federal courts may act to overturn felon voting bans. Muhammad Shabazz Farrakhan, who brought the suit, argued, correctly, that these bans dispropotionately disenfranchise people of color. A panel of judges from the federal Ninth Circuit Court found in January that the law did in fact violate the Voting Rights Act. That momentous decision went out the window, however, when the full Ninth Circuit overturned the decision earlier this month.

Anna Hirsch wrote about the racism and inequality of voting bans over on the Race in America blog earlier this month, and Change.org readers are urging Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna to stop fighting in court to defend his state's racist voting ban and instead embrace reform. Join them here.

Farrakhan could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined this week to hear a similar case, Simmons v. Galvin, which challenges Massachusetts' voting ban on racial grounds. Venerable court observer Linda Greenhouse wrote this summer that the justices may prefer to take up this issue in Farrakhan.

We'll wait to see what the courts do with felon voting rights, but key elections are taking place while the justices deliberate. The Sentencing Project report points to encouraging progress, and it's up to us to build on that progress in our own states. Find out what your state is doing and get involved.

Photo Credit: Rob Boudon