Excerpt from a Huffington Post opinion piece on state laws that bar former felons from voting, written by Ira Glasser, retired ACLU executive director:
Today, one of every 13 black Americans is barred from voting as a result of felony disenfranchisement laws.
This has been especially, although not uniquely, true in the states of the old Confederacy, where felony disenfranchisement laws were born and nurtured after the Civil War as one way among many to avoid the commands of the then-new 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race or color. And it is the only one of those 19th-century inventions that survived the civil rights movement and its transformative laws in the mid-1960s. To this day, the highest proportions of African-American citizens so barred from voting are in Southern states — 23.3% in Florida, 22.3% in Kentucky, 20.4% in Virginia, 18.9% in Tennessee, 15% in Alabama, and 13.9% in Mississippi. When you consider that blacks who vote vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and when you consider how close recent elections for the Senate and for Governor have been in these states, it is no wonder that these states have remained solidly in the column that the media have dubbed “red states.”
7. The final outrage about all this is that such people, though barred from voting, are counted for the purpose of determining the state’s electoral votes and numbers of representatives in Congress and state legislatures. Thus, like the infamous three-fifths compromise during the days of slavery, which counted slaves for the purposes of representation while denying them citizenship, voters not allowed to vote by felony disenfranchisement laws enhance the political representation of the states banning them. How this can be tolerated by anyone claiming we are a representative democracy has always escaped me.