Bury Me Broken

Felons and Disenfranchisement

From MYDD, I went to righttovote.org and was quite surprised at the numbers.

Permanent disenfranchisement for some felony convictions:
AZ, DE, MD, MS, NV, TN, WA, WY

Permanent disenfranchisement for all felony convictions:
AL, FL, IA, KY, VA

All other states have restoration of voting rights after released from prison (DC, HI, IL, IN, MA, MI, MT, NH, ND, OH, OR, PA, SD, UT), released from prison and complete parole (CA, CO, CT, NY) released from prison and completion of parole and probation (AK, AR, GA, ID, KS, LA, MN, MO, NE*, NJ, NM, NC, OK, RI, SC, TX, WV, WI) or no voting rights removed regardless of felony conviction (ME, PR, VT ).

There is also a map that allows you to look at individual states and the number of disenfrachised, percentage of population, number of African Americans and percentage of African Americans disenfrachised.

For example, TN where I was born has: 91,149 or 2.2%; 41,759 African American or 6.6% of that population in TN.

Where I presently reside, FL, the numbers are horrendous: 827,207 or 7% of the population of FL has no vote as well as 256,392 or 16% of African Americans in FL without a vote.

VA has 310, 661 or 5.9% with 161,559 African American or 16.1%.

TX has 525,967 or 3.5% of the population and 164,873 African Americans or 9.2%.

CA has 288,362 or 1.2% of its population while GA has 286,277 or 4.9% of its population and AL has 212,650 or 6.4% of its population without the right to vote. The state of NY only has 131, 273 or 1%.

Some states with small African American populations had tremendous percentage of total population with IA at the top with 24.9% of its African American population without the right to vote.

posted by niteskolar @ 5:10 PM