The largest single group of American citizens who are barred by law from participating in elections are those with felony convictions, according to the American Journal of Sociology (AJS).
Punishment for felony level crimes in the United States generally carries collateral consequences, including temporary or permanent voting restrictions.
Voting rights in the United States before the Civil War had generally been limited to White males.
By the mid-1960s, most of the legal barriers to political participation for U.S. citizens had fallen.
One of the few remaining restrictions on the right to vote is the felon voting ban.
“Felon disenfranchisement laws are ‘race neutral’ on their face, but in the United States race is clearly tied to criminal punishment. African-American imprisonment rates have consistently exceeded White rates since at least the Civil War era and remain approximately seven times higher than rates among Whites today,” according to page 560 of Volume 109, Number 3 (November 2003) of the AJS.
In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld felon disenfranchisement measures in Richardson v. Ramirez, facilitating states to distinguish those “fit to possess the rights of citizenship” from other members of society.
“No other contemporary democracy disenfranchises felons to the same extent or in the same manner as the United States,” according to the AJS.
The most restrictive form of felon disenfranchisement a state can adopt is that which disenfranchises ex-felons.
These laws ban voting, often indefinitely, even after successful completion of probation, parole or prison sentences.
Also, in spite of the changes inaugurated by the “second reconstruction” of the 1960s, a number of scholars have argued that racial influence on policy making persists, according to the AJS.
The AJS points out that the historical process in the United States has been characterized as a shift from “Jim Crow racism” to “laissez-faire racism.”
