Public Attitudes Toward Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States

Abstract

Since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, debates about suffrage in the United States have largely shifted from questions about formal individual rights to participation to questions of fairness in the policy implementation of those rights. Prior to the Voting Rights Act, the disenfranchisement of African American voters provided a vivid example of persistent suffrage inequities in the American political system, and its passage was a landmark development in the struggles to extend the franchise to all citizens (Keyssar 2000). After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, however, concern over voting rights faded rapidly. As one authoritative treatment puts it, “at least since the voting rights reforms of the 1960s, political rights have been universalized in the United States. With relatively insignificant exceptions, all adult citizens have the full complement of political rights” (Verba, Scholzman, and Brady 1995, p. 11). The apparently settled character of the right to vote and its disappearance from the scholarly and popular literatures on American democracy, however, is challenged by the rapid growth in incarceration and conviction rates within the criminal justice system over the past three decades (U.S. Department of Justice 2003). Election laws in most states bar felons and some ex-felons from voting, and it has been estimated that between 4.1 and 4.7 million Americans are currently disenfranchised due to a past or current felony conviction