American Civil Liberties Union

On April 12, Maryland became the first state in the country to count incarcerated people as residents of their hometowns, rather than as residents of the place where they are imprisoned, for the purposes of legislative districting. The passage of the No Representation Without Population Act ends prison-based gerrymandering, which falsely inflates the political power of districts with prisons, due to the U.S. Census’s practice of counting incarcerated populations as residents of the prison.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the state of Washington's law barring individuals with felony convictions from voting is a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act because the law has a racially discriminatory effect on minorities and results in the denial of their right to vote purely on the basis of their race or color. The ruling in Farrakhan v. Gregoire is a long overdue victory for what has been an uphill battle in getting the courts to recognize that there is an irrefutable connection between racial bias in the criminal justice system and the impact felon disfranchisement laws have on minority communities.

Voting rights cases extol the right to vote as fundamental and preservative of all rights. Indeed, the right to vote without regard to race, gender, age, or class is protected by numerous constitutional amendments and federal laws. Therefore, Indiana's voter identification law departed from well-established constitutional principles when it required voters to possess a valid, current government-issued photo identification in order to cast a ballot on this past Election Day. After a long partisan battle, Indiana imposed new burdens on minorities, women, students, the elderly and the poor.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

As the Supreme Court has indicated, "[n]o right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined." Unfortunately, in America today, millions of citizens work, pay taxes, live in our communities and bring up families, yet they are without a voice. According to a 2008 ACLU/Brennan Center report, an estimated 5.3 million citizens cannot vote as a result of a felony conviction, and nearly 4 million of those citizens have been released from prison and are living and working in the community.

Worse still, felony disfranchisement laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era and were intended to bar minorities from voting. The impact of these laws continues today. Nationwide, 13 percent of African American men have lost the right to vote — a rate seven times the national average. Latino citizens are also disproportionately disfranchised because they are over-represented in the criminal justice system. In turn, this has impacted the families of those who are disfranchised and the communities in which they reside by reducing their collective political voice.

States have vastly different approaches to allowing those with criminal convictions to vote, which often compound the problems further. For example, some states disfranchise some, but not all, citizens with criminal convictions, while others allow voting after a sentence is completed or after release from prison. Two states, Virginia and Kentucky, permanently disfranchise citizens with felony convictions unless the state approves individual rights restoration; two states, Maine and Vermont, allow all persons with felony convictions to vote, even while incarcerated; all other states fall somewhere in between.