States Vary Widely on Restoring Voting Rights for Felons
SIDEBAR: Few Felons Regain Right to Vote in Florida Under Gov. Scott’s Changes
Josh and Katy Vander Kamp met in drug rehab. In the
seven years since, they have been rebuilding their
lives in Apache Junction, Ariz., a small town east of
Phoenix.
He’s a landscaper; she’s studying for a master’s degree
in addictions counseling. They have two children, a dog
and a house. Their lives reveal little of their past,
except that Katy can vote and Josh can’t because he’s a
two-time felon.
She’s been arrested three times, but never convicted of
a felony. By age 21, Josh was charged with two — for a
drug-paraphernalia violation and possessing a burglary
tool.
“I didn’t do anything that he didn’t do, and he’s
paying for it for the rest of his life,” Katy
said.
With voting laws a heated issue this election year as
civil rights groups and state legislatures battle over
photo ID requirements, felon disenfranchisement laws
have attracted less attention despite the potential
votes at stake.
A patchwork of restrictions in every state but Maine
and Vermont keep about 5.85 million Americans with
felony convictions off voting rolls, according to The
Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based criminal
justice reform advocacy group. The report also suggests
that some races are hit by these laws more than others.
A felon in Maine can vote from prison using an absentee
ballot, while a felon convicted of the same crime in
Florida, the state with the highest percentage of
disenfranchised African Americans in the nation, might
never regain the right to vote — even after
release.
People convicted of more than one felony in Arizona
lose gun ownership and voting rights until a county
court restores them. Josh Vander Kamp’s first attempt
at regaining his rights failed last year.
With his wife’s help, Josh Vander Kamp applied to the
county court that sentenced him in both cases. About
three months later he was rejected. Vander Kamp said
he’s not sure why his past is still a problem.
“It’s over and done with. I’ve put it behind me. I wish
other people would put it behind them,” he said.
Laws vary widely on how felons lose their voting rights
and how states restore them.
In Mississippi, 22 categories of crime result in
disenfranchisement. Timber larceny is on the list;
manslaughter is not. Felons who want their voting
rights back must be approved by a two-thirds vote in
both houses of the legislature, and the governor can
sign or veto it.
Until 2007, Maryland disenfranchised people convicted
of misdemeanors involving corruption or fraud. Alabama
denies the vote to anyone convicted of distributing
pornography, even if it depicts consenting
adults.
Pennsylvania felons can register to vote when they are
released from prison. Kentucky felons must apply to the
governor.
Reform advocates see voting as a symbolic key step to
returning felons to communities.
“When people are punished for crimes that they’ve
committed, that should not involve forfeiting their
basic rights of citizenship, which is what felony
disenfranchisement does,” said Marc Mauer, executive
director of The Sentencing Project.
The group estimates that 75 percent of disenfranchised
felons are no longer incarcerated.
Allen Jenkins, a black resident of Nashville, Tenn.,
was released in 1996 after serving one year for a drug
charge. Jenkins, 51, still hasn’t regained his voting
rights.
“I’m a U.S. citizen,” Jenkins said. “I should be able
to vote for whoever I want and to give my
opinion.”
Across the country, racial minorities are more likely
to be barred from voting because of felony convictions,
reform advocates say. Blacks made up 12.6 percent of
the U.S. population in 2010, but 37.9 percent of the
more than 1.5 million people in federal and state
prisons, according to data from the Census and the
federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Click on the image to launch the interactive gallery.
Photos by Michael Ciaglo and Lizzie Chen/News21.
“Much of it involves the fact that law enforcement
agencies have targeted low-income communities of color
in particular … often to the exclusion of more well-off
communities where drug use and drug selling may be more
likely to take place behind closed doors or where
there’s less efforts made to address drug-selling
activity,” Mauer said.
In Tennessee, drug offenders were about 16 percent of
the inmate population in 2010-11, according to the
state Department of Correction.
Nonviolent felons in Tennessee can apply to have their
voting rights restored, but the felony charge remains
on their records even if their application is approved.
As of July 1, one-time felons also can restore their
rights by expunging the charge from their
records.
Jenkins, a single father of two, has struggled
financially since his conviction. He thought a clean
record could help him find a job, which is why he will
apply to expunge the drug conviction, he said.
“I should not be condemned over something I’ve done in
the past when that past is dead,” Jenkins said.
Supporters of disenfranchisement laws said the policies
preserve the integrity of the American legal system by
stopping people who might choose to undermine it with
their votes.
“If you are unwilling to follow the law, then you can’t
demand a right to make the law for everyone else, and
that’s what you’re doing when you vote,” said Roger
Clegg, president and general counsel of the Falls
Church, Va.-based Center for Equal Opportunity, a
conservative think tank on issues of ethnicity and
race.
Voting rights should be restored case by case, Clegg
said, and only after felons can prove they’ve “turned
over a new leaf.”
The governors in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia
have the last say when determining who that might be.
After taking office in January 2011, Iowa’s Republican
Gov. Terry Branstad revoked the automatic restoration
process established by former Gov. Tom Vilsack, a
Democrat.
Iowa’s application process has drawn complaints from
the American Civil Liberties Union and felons who want
to vote. Applicants must submit a criminal history, a
credit report and pay all fines and court fees to
regain voting rights.
David Christian, 33, owes $155,000 in restitution
related to a 2008 voluntary manslaughter charge. He’s
paid $941 of it in nine months. The Iowa City resident,
who lives with his parents and works full-time at the
family store, said it will be difficult for him to pay
his debt.
“I will be disenfranchised for the foreseeable future,
maybe a few decades, because I can’t pay restitution,”
he said.
Christian, who is on parole until May 2013, filed to
have his rights restored though he knew he was
ineligible. His rejection letter came in the mail June
25.
He registered to vote when he was 18, and last voted
during the 2008 presidential election while he was a
pretrial detainee. Christian said he feels like a
second-class citizen now.
“I want to be able to have a voice,” Christian said.
Branstad has approved the only 10 applications that
crossed his desk between December 2011 and May 15,
according to Larry Johnson, deputy legal counsel for
the Iowa Governor’s Office. Johnson said three other
applications were returned because they were
incomplete.
Felons in Florida must apply to the state Board of
Executive Clemency — Gov. Rick Scott and his
three-person Cabinet — after they have completed their
sentences, paid restitution and waited five or seven
years, depending on the offense.
Scott tightened the state’s policy in March 2011 and
has approved dramatically fewer applications than his
predecessors, Republican Govs. Charlie Crist and Jeb
Bush, who both streamlined the process.
Between 2011 and early July, 195 felons regained their
rights, according to the Florida Parole Commission. But
a backlog of 21,197 applications as of July 1 means
Florida felons who have completed their sentences could
wait a decade or more for a decision.
Humberto Aguilar, a Cuban-born Miami resident who
applied in 2005, is still waiting.
Aguilar, an attorney for drug smugglers in the 1980s,
was indicted for tax evasion and drug crimes. He fled
and was a fugitive in Europe before being extradited to
face the charges.
He returned to South Florida as a parolee in 2000.
After working at hotels and a non-profit, Aguilar
became a money-laundering consultant.
It’s been about seven years since he applied to become
a “whole human being again.”
“If you cannot participate in the everyday political
life of this country, you are like an 1840s slave. You
have no rights,” Aguilar said.
Unlike Branstad and Scott, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell
has made voting rights restoration easier. He
campaigned on a promise to process applications within
three months, but completes the work in 60 days. Under
former Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine, restoration could
take up to one year.
McDonnell has restored the rights of about 3,000
Virginians during his first two years in office,
signing off on nearly nine of every 10 applications.
Kaine approved a record 4,402 applications over four
years. McDonnell is on track to surpass that number.
Richard W. Walker, 54, regained his rights under
McDonnell after a 2004 drug conviction. The prospect of
getting his rights back inspired him to beat a 40-year
addiction, Walker said.
While in rehabilitation in 2007, Walker met McDonnell,
then Virginia’s attorney general. Walker said McDonnell
promised to personally hand his application to Kaine.
“I knew at that time I was done with drugs and
alcohol,” Walker said.
McDonnell restored Walker’s rights in April, and in
December, Walker will mark five years of sobriety. He
now heads Bridging the Gap in Virginia, a nonprofit
that helps felons readjust to society.
Felon disenfranchisement has an impact on the national
political debate, said Christopher Uggen, a
professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota
and the lead researcher for The Sentencing Project
report.
“Whether it’s welfare reform or whether it is
progressive taxation or whether it is the withdrawal of
troops from Afghanistan, each of those issues is going
to be decided without the voices of six million people
who are disproportionately poor, disproportionately
persons of color,” Uggen said.
The 1985 Supreme Court decision in Hunter v. Underwood
held that Alabama’s felon disenfranchisement law was
intended to remove blacks and poor whites from voter
rolls, and established a high bar for suits that allege
racial discrimination, said Louis Seidman, a Georgetown
University professor of constitutional law.
“In this particular case it was much easier because
these people just got up... on the floor of the
legislature and said, ‘This is a way to prevent blacks
from voting,’ and nobody who is around today is that
unsubtle,” Seidman said.
Legislation that would create a national standard also
has failed in Congress. Democrats introduced the Voter
Empowerment Act of 2012, which proposes sweeping
changes in how federal elections are conducted and
would let felons who are out of prison vote in federal
elections.
In 2011, President Barack Obama said the Department of
Justice has the “capacity and the obligation” to
monitor states’ felon-disenfranchisement laws to make
sure they are not “purposely exclusionary.”
“One of the strengths of America has always been that
this is a land of second chances,” Obama said.
But states’ rights advocates disagree.
“The 14th Amendment of the Constitution makes it very
clear that states have the ability to remove the voting
rights of individuals who have been convicted of
rebellion or other crime,” said Hans von Spakovsky,
senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a
Washington, D.C., conservative public policy research
institute.
Meanwhile, these laws can change rapidly, through an
executive order as in Iowa — or the process could take
longer.
Rhode Island voters approved a constitutional amendment
in 2006 to give parolees and probationers voting
rights.
Felon volunteers and their advocates spent about two
years door-knocking, lobbying and campaigning to
“change hearts and minds,” said Sol Rodriguez,
executive director of OpenDoors, a Providence, R.I.,
nonprofit that provides re-entry services for felons
and led the voting rights effort.
The voting rights of 17,606 Rhode Islanders were
restored and 6,330 of them registered to vote by the
2008 general election, according to OpenDoors.
When Jaleeza Oliver, 20, was released in May, she went
to OpenDoors to sign up for services. When asked if
she’d like to register to vote, Oliver said yes.
“It makes me feel I’m more part of the community rather
than being rejected because of a record,” she said.
Andrea Rumbaugh, Jeremy Knop, Alissa Skelton and
Michael Ciaglo contributed to this article.
Maryann Batlle was an Ethics and Excellence in
Journalism Foundation Fellow this summer at
News21.
American Public Media’s Public Insight Network
contributed to this article.
For comments or feedback, email news@news21.com
