State Laws Unjustly Bar Voters, ACLU Says

A patchwork of inconsistent and flawed rules to bar felons from voting have improperly denied millions of Americans their legal right to cast a ballot, the American Civil Liberties Union charged Monday.

In a 44-page report, the ACLU said it found serious flaws in how states applied their laws, giving administrators little guidance on how to properly purge voter registration lists to insure that people who had a legal right to vote were not disfranchised.

“The risk of error is huge,” said the ACLU’s lead author, Laleh Ispahani.

The group said about 5 million Americans had lost their voting rights because they were in prison, on parole or serving probation, or had permanently lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction.

The ACLU examined laws in the 50 states, finding that all but Vermont and Maine denied imprisoned felons the ability to vote.

The other 48 states include 14 that permanently deny voting to some or all past convicts and 31 that restrict those on probation. Iowa and Virginia are among those that permanently block people convicted of felonies from voting.

But even states that allow restoration of voting rights often fail to properly follow the law, Ispahani said.

Local officials, she said, compare lists of convicted felons and registered voters, purging identical names without any other identifiers, such as a date of birth. The study found that no state sets legal standards for criteria to match names and identities.

The ACLU said the system resulted in many individuals being purged who had never been convicted of a crime. Ispahani cited the case of a Georgia man who was eliminated when officials confused him with his son, who had been convicted of a felony.

Because purge lists are not disclosed, it is not possible to know the full extent of the problem, Ispahani said. In the 2000 election, a number of eligible Florida voters were mistakenly stripped from the rolls.

Even states that allow past felons to regain their voting rights often fail to properly notify individuals that they have been removed from the registration lists, she said.

Of the 5 million Americans in some felony category, 13% are black men. The report did not address the political affiliations of disfranchised individuals, but other studies suggested that they were mainly Democrats.

Among other recommendations, the ACLU called for mandatory notification of individuals when state officials removed their name from registration lists.