Voter Turnout—or Burnout?
Registering the impact of voter disenfranchisement

Winter 2004, Volume 26, Number 1

Kay Lehman Schlozman

Civics classes have taught us that each American citizen, regardless of race, income, or sex, becomes an equal of his or her peers in a voting booth. But what happens to American democracy when disenfranchised citizens, especially those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, do not vote?

This was one of the central questions addressed in a lecture series on political inequality co-sponsored by IPR.

Political participation expert Kay Lehman Schlozman tackled the problem of how social inequality leads to political inequality in her keynote lecture “What Do We Want? Political Equality! When Are We Gonna Get It? Never.”

Schlozman is the J. Joseph Moakley Endowed Professor of Political Science at Boston College and co-author of Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism and American Politics and The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender, Equality, and Political Participation.

Schlozman underscored that roughly “one-quarter of political activity is a legacy from our parents.” For a variety of reasons, people who have well-educated parents are more likely to vote, be politically active, and make a campaign contribution. Nine percent of the wealthiest Americans account for almost two-thirds of all U.S. political campaign contributions, she said.

This uneven level of political participation, she pointed out, indicates the government is “hearing a skewed set of messages.” When they do take part, disadvantaged Americans are more concerned, for example, about basic needs such as public housing, welfare, and jobs than are wealthier Americans. “Politicians are not hearing from many people who could use government assistance,” she said.

Who Gets to Vote? Felons, Absentees, and Democracy
In this panel Jeff Manza, associate professor of sociology and IPR associate director and faculty fellow, detailed the explosion in the number of U.S. felons—from 900,000 in the early 1970s to five million today—and its electoral impact. He started by pointing out that of virtually all world democracies, the U.S. is the only one that disenfranchises large numbers of nonincarcerated felons and ex-felons.

Although the U.S. has an average rate of violent crime vis-à-vis other Western democracies, it has the highest rate of felony convictions—in some cases six to ten times that of other countries. In 2000, 4.7 million felons were prevented from voting, of whom 1.9 million were African American. Interestingly, in the same year Florida had the highest rate of felon disenfranchisement—7 percent of the voting population. In a survey of 400 Senate elections from 1978 to 2000, Manza has found that if felons had been allowed to vote, seven would have been overturned. Restricted felon voting rights have “provided a small but clear advantage to Republican candidates in every presidential and senatorial election from 1972 to 2000,” he said.

Suing for the Right to Vote by Absentee Ballot
Chicago lawyer Thomas Geoghegan shared his insights on the lawsuit that is now before the Illinois State Court of Appeals on behalf of five single working mothers. The mothers, whose harried schedules make it all but impossible for them to go to the polls on election day, requested absentee ballots. Cook County authorities denied their request because they were not going to be “out of the county” on election day—an outdated rule from Illinois’ “horse-and-buggy days,” Geoghegan said. “This is a country where the fundamental opportunity to vote is disappearing as working lives are growing,” he continued.

Other speakers included Dr. Paul Straight with the Chicago Urban League, who underscored the racial discrimination inherent in felon voting laws, and George Mitchell, head of the NAACP’s Evanston, Ill., Chapter, who spoke about his chapter’s participation in local redistricting efforts.

The undergraduates who organized the lecture series, Laura Beres and Tyler Jaeckel, also included a participatory exercise in democracy. They worked with community organizers on a voter-registration drive in Chicago. “We wanted our fellow students to become activists and to understand the realities of political participation,” they said.

The voter-registration drive, keynote lecture, and other events were part of the Fall 2003 Undergraduate Lecture Series on Race, Poverty, and Inequality. Its theme was “Inequality in American Democracy.”