Modern-Day Voter Disenfranchisement

It's an election year. Joy.

Because of the ongoing political activity, I think there is a very important factor which deserves our attention about the present state of voting...

Probably the most celebrated and (rightfully) proudest achievement of the women's movement is gaining the right to vote back in 1920. Naturally, an expansion of democracy and civic power is quite a good thing. The failure to extend suffrage to female voters was an extraordinarily regrettable injustice which continues to cause endless carping to this day.

But today women in the U.S. represent (slightly) more than half of the electorate and both parties continually scramble to win their votes. Why is this? Why is it women represent roughly 52% of the voting base?

The biggest factor is the fact that women tend to live 6-7 years longer than men. There are fewer male voters because they… um… die sooner. (This is, as many American females assure us, a phenomenon which is unimportant and should not concern anybody... and perhaps it's even a little bit humorous, too. But I shan't go there today...)

There is a smaller (but arguably more disturbing) factor that contributes to the fact that women comprise more than half of the voter base, and I think it deserves a great deal more attention than it presently gets. It also gives rise to the question of who, exactly, is being disenfranchised in the modern day.

Who is Being Denied the Vote Today?

During the disputed election of November, 2000 the media focused on small, technical issues: hanging chads, absentee ballots and the like. But the day after the November election in 2000, Human Rights Watch issued a study reporting that a "decisive" element in the Florida election was the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of men, either in prison or among the more than 400,000 "ex-offenders" who were permanently disenfranchised due to their criminal records. Significantly, these male voters are disproportionately black. HRW estimated "more than 200,000 potential black voters [were] excluded from the polls."

In seven states, HRW reported, "one in four black men is permanently barred" from voting; "almost every state in the U.S. denies prisoners the right to vote" and "fourteen states bar criminal offenders from voting even after they have finished their sentences," thus permanently disenfranchising "over one million ex-offenders."

These disenfranchised voters are disproportionately African-American and Latino: there is a strong case to show racism here. But these disenfranchised voters are also overwhelmingly male. Since the disenfranchised group is more disproportionately male than it is disproportionately non-white, this form of disenfranchisement is actually more sexist than it is racist!

What's that, NiceGuy? Men are being denied the vote? Surely the numbers are small!

"More than 13 percent of black men (some 1.4 million nationwide) are disenfranchised for many years, sometimes for life, a result of felony convictions" according to University of New Mexico Law Professor Tim Canova.

In Alabama and Florida, over 6 percent of potential voters were excluded because of laws barring ex-felons; "for blacks in Alabama, the rate is 12.4 percent and in Florida 13.8 percent"; "In five other states-Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia and Wyoming-felony disenfranchisement laws affected one in four black men", according to a November 3rd, 2000 piece in the New York Times.

Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40% of black men may permanently lose their right to vote sometime in the next century.

In total, it's been estimated that the number of disenfranchised voters is more than 4 million people almost all of whom are men, regardless of race.

But NiceGuy, surely this doesn't make a difference!

Actually, it does. The sociologists Jeff Manza (from Northwestern University) and Christopher Uggen (from the University of Minnesota), examined close Senate elections since 1978, they concluded that these disenfranchised voters could have changed the results of elections in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Florida and Wyoming. Democracy is most definitely being affected.

Citing the same studies, the Santa Fe New Mexican (November 19, 2000) pointed out that 5.5 percent of potential voters in New Mexico (in which the 2000 elections were almost a tie) were disenfranchised by felony convictions. "As many as 45 percent of black males in the state can't vote- the highest ratio in the country". Figures were not available for Latinos, who constitute 60 percent of the state's prisoners (and about 40 percent of the estimated population), but one imagines the conclusions can be similar.

Most significantly, neither party seems interested in addressing the issue. Republicans think they have little to gain because these voters are mainly thought to be potential Democrats. And Democrats don't want to appear to be weak on crime, so they're not too enthusiastic about taking-up this issue either.

During the eight years of their tenure, Clinton and Gore helped to disenfranchise a major voting bloc that could've easily swung the 2000 election to Gore. During their administration, the prison population swelled from 1.4 to 2 million. (Oopsie!) Gee, thanks Clinton! Thanks for the harsher sentencing laws and building more prisons than any other president! Yeesh. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...

Twenty years ago, the US was similar to other industrial countries in rate of incarceration. By today, it is the world's leader in per capita incarceration rates ranking above present-day Russia and South Africa during the apartheid years. The vast majority of those imprisoned have been (and still are) male.

And let us not forget that there wasn't a federal law against raping prisoners until 2003(!) Compare that to the hysterical attention which consumes the rape of females...

But NiceGuy! These disenfranchised people are criminals! They shouldn't deserve to vote!

That's one of the points I'm trying to make: no one cares.

You see, the smart way of gradually reducing everybody's rights is to start attacking the rights of people that nobody cares about. Criminals, immigrants, the homeless, homosexuals, unpopular ethnic minorities… politically-weak and forgotten groups like those. Quite ominous indeed, in my opinion.

Many European countries abandoned voting restrictions for criminals long ago.

Canada's Supreme Court restored prisoners' voting rights in 2002, calling the old practice of disenfranchisement "undemocratic".

In 1999, the Constitutional Court of South Africa gave inmates suffrage, saying that the "vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood."

The National Law Journal (October 30, 2000) comments: "The American Bar Association Standards on Civil Disabilities of a Convicted Person, approved in 1980, state flatly that '[persons] convicted of any offense should not be deprived of the right to vote' and that laws subjecting convicts to collateral civil disabilities 'should be repealed'."

If we truly want to integrate rehabilitated criminals back in to society, surely they deserve to participate in the same democratic rituals in which ordinary citizens are allowed to?

And the fact that there is almost no awareness of this phenomenon is the perfect proof of how serious the problem is. It ought to be considered a very serious human rights violation. But do you wanna know why it doesn't get the attention it deserves?

Probably because it doesn't affect white, suburban, middle-class females. White women are important people, you see. Black and Latino men are not nearly as important as white-middle class women. If this issue was mainly affecting white females, you know that both Republicans and Democrats (in addition to feminists of every stripe) would all be jumping up and down, screaming in anger. Hollering and ranting demanding to know why these women are being so oppressed.

Yes, there may have been a time in the past when women were unfairly denied the right to vote... However society turns a blind eye to the fact that today, there are a large number of men who are being denied the vote.

That's because men matter less. As much as women whine and carp about how they were unfairly excluded from exercising their rights for centuries, they really don't give a fig when anyone without a vagina is subjected to the exact same treatment.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"He who falls into the snares of women is like a bird that falls into the hands of a little silly child: the child plays with it merrily and is glad, but meanwhile the bird endures the pains of death, and undergoes all manner of tortures." -- Kevin Solway.

Back to Home