The end of immigrant voting rights early in the twentieth century coincided with other efforts to disenfranchise Americans: poll taxes, literacy tests, and restrictive residency requirements.

Today, many of those practices have been exposed and ended. Yet disenfranchisement remains a serious threat to American voters today, particularly to those who have committed felonies but have re-paid their debt to society.

The Immigrant Voting Project maintains a dialogue with organizations like Unlock the Block, which is working to challenge felony disenfranchisement laws, which prevent ex-offenders from voting in some states; to eliminate barriers to voting for those eligible by ensuring that City and State Agencies are in active compliance with the law; to educate prisoners, ex-prisoners, parolees, probationers and their families about their voting rights and the importance of voting; to register those eligible individuals and to mobilize their communities to vote.  

The Immigrant Voting Project also follows with interest the fate of the Right to Vote Amendment introduced by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

ARTICLES ON DISENFRANCHISEMENT

The New York Times
September 17, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
How Denying the Vote to Ex-Offenders Undermines Democracy
By BRENT STAPLES

Pundits blame apathy for the decline in voter turnout that has become a fact of life in the United States in the last several decades. But not everyone who skips the polls on Election Day does so by choice. This November, for example, an estimated five million people - roughly 2.3 percent of the number of people eligible to vote - will be barred from voting by state laws that strip convicted felons of the franchise, often temporarily but sometimes for life.

These laws cast a permanent shadow over the poor minority communities where disenfranchised people typically live. Children grow up with the unfortunate example of neighbors, parents and grandparents who never vote and never engage in the political process, even superficially.

As a consequence, the struggling communities that need political leadership most of all are trapped within a posture of disengagement that deepens from one generation to the next. READ MORE
 

Patrick Draper's weblog
Felon and Immigrant Voting Rights
Patrick Draper
August 23, 2004

Phyllis Schlafly wrote her August 16th column on the subjects of felon and noncitizen voting. For over a century convicted felons have been denied the right to vote in many states, mostly in the South, even after their sentences have been served in full. There are now about 5 million Americans who cannot vote because of a past felony conviction. Thirteen percent of the African American population is permanently barred from voting. With respect to immigrants, there are now 30 million people living in the United States who are foreign-born, and of that number 12 million are legal permanent residents who are not citizens. The number of immigrants living in the United States has tripled since 1965, forming an extremely large group that has no voting rights at all.

Enfranchisement has followed a generally progressive trajectory for the entire history of the country. The vote was given to the landless. Blacks and women received the right to vote later. Poll taxes and literacy tests were eliminated. The most recent extension of enfranchisement came with the passage of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution giving 18-year olds the right to vote. The only backward steps were the disenfranchisement of felons in the late 19th century, and immigrants in the 1920's. READ MORE
 

Tompaine.com
August 26, 2004
Jim Crow's New Party 
By Julian Bond 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the People for the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) released a report this week that documents decade after decade of race-based efforts to deter minority voters—African Americans, Latinos, Indians—from casting their votes.

While American history—especially Southern history—is full of horror stories about minority voter intimidation, many of the documented instances of targeting racial groups to keep them from casting votes are current-day events. They aren’t happening in long-ago Selma, Alabama; instead, they occur today in Michigan, Kentucky, South Dakota and Pennsylvania—as well as in the heavily black counties of the South.

Ironically, it was the country’s most successful civil rights law—the 1965 Voting Right Act, passed in the aftermath of Selma’s Bloody Sunday—that eliminated harsh measures and ushered in today’s more polite discrimination.

When the 1965 Act eliminated literacy tests, poll taxes and gave the federal government added tools to punish anti-voting terrorists and protect access to the franchise, the enemies of democracy turned to other means. With the whip, dynamite, torch and burning cross no longer effective weapons, they turned to more sophisticated tools.

They posted armed guards and real and make-believe policemen at the polls. They told voters they could cast their votes on alternative days, even after the actual election was over. They demanded forms of identification not required by law. They told voters outstanding warrants or utility bills would prevent them from voting. They said immigration officials would haunt the polls, checking on voters' immigration status. They constructed phony voter purge lists which included names of longtime legitimate voters. They loosed the FBI and State Police on elderly voters. They videotaped voters approaching polling places. They set-up so called “ballot security” and “ballot integrity” programs, based on the racist presumption that minority voters are inveterate election-day cheaters, and they harassed and intimated those voters at will. READ MORE

The New York Daily News
August 22, 2004
Albany makes bad elections worse
By LORRAINE C. MINNITE

Following the chaotic presidential election of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which is supposed to help safeguard against Florida-style election problems by making funds available to states to improve election administration. But many state legislatures - including New York's - have dragged their feet. Albany lawmakers to date have failed to pass comprehensive implementing legislation or appropriate the required matching funds.

Key to the new law are provisional ballots and a voter complaint procedure that allow voters to assert their right to vote if they are denied a ballot and to stand up to intimidation - what some call vote-suppression tactics.

This continues to play an insidious role in American elections and is used to particular effect against members of minority groups and new immigrant voters.

A calculated effort to keep the vote down among certain groups of voters, it has taken many forms since the Reconstruction era, when crude and violent means were used to prevent African-Americans from voting. READ MORE
 

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