felon disenfranchisement

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 25 13:29:09 PST 2002


Just got a copy of the premier issue of Legal Affairs, "the magazine at the intersection of law and life" <http://www.legalaffairs.org>. It has a page on the political consequences of felon disenfranchisement in the U.S. - 48 states restrict the voting rights of convicted felons (40 prohibit voting by inmates, 8 more strip ex-cons of voting rights for life). Florida banned 887,812 from voting; had they been allowed to vote, the magazine estimates that Gore would have carried the state by 93,429, instead of "losing" by 537. It also estimates, drawing on a paper by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen <ttp://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/>, that were felons allowed to vote in national elections, the Senate wouldn't have gone Republican, and would be 55:45 D:R today.

Doug



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