Tracking The Road to Disenfranchisement

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

A new statistical analysis of the adoption of laws disenfranchising felons in the United States finds that these laws are rooted in a backlash against access to the ballot box on the part of African Americans.

The study, by sociologists Angela Behrens and Christopher Uggen at the University of Minnesota and IPR’s Jeff Manza, traces the rise of state disfranchisement laws from 1850 to the present, illuminating the racial motivations behind statutes that still have a profound impact on the national political landscape.

While criminal disfranchisement is hardly an American invention, two-thirds of the states had no such laws in 1850. But by 2000, only Maine and Vermont had failed to restrict felon voting rights. The most restrictive form of disenfranchisement — ending suffrage for all ex-felons — expanded from just over one-third of the states in 1850 to more than 75% in 1920, before a period of liberalization in the 1970s.

This critical change was largely a product of the period from the 1850s through th early 1900s, as the states grappled with the requirements of the 14th and 15th Amendments, which defined citizenship and brought suffrage to black males.

While ostensibly “race neutral,” these laws were in many cases the product of explicitly racist arguments, including, in Alabama in 1901, a calculation of how many African Americans would be disenfranchised by crimes of “moral turpitude,” such as wife-beating.

In the post-Jim Crow era, this overt racism was replaced with more subtle expressions of the same sentiments — the hostility described by “racial threat” theory (in simplest terms, the fear of loss of power a dominant group harbors for a significant minority) endured.

The influence of racial threat is demonstrated, according to the study, in the strong relationship between the composition of prison populations and the passage of disfranchisement laws. More than any other factor, the number of non-whites in a state’s prisons is directly related to the probability that that state will restrict felon voting rights.

But more than an historical process, the evolution of disenfranchisement laws is a current event, something now contested on the state and national levels. In recent years, both conservative and liberal laws have been passed by the states, with liberalization of the right to vote the more prevalent outcome.

For example, three states curtailed their voting restrictions in 2001 and a bill to ban ex-felon disenfranchisement in federal elections reached the floor of the Senate in February 2002, although it was defeated.