Alabama and Virginia expanded voting rights to felons. Why not Wisconsin?

In last night's Senate win in Alabama for Democrat Doug Jones, it was hard to ignore this part of the race's exit poll.

Black voters turned out for Doug Jones https://t.co/WtNWgL0FuU pic.twitter.com/4wVNHuC1W8

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) December 13, 2017

It's no surprise that black voters overwhelmingly chose Jones over Roy "We were better under slavery" Moore. But the bigger stat is that 28% of last night's vote came from African-Americans, in a state that is less than 27% black. And interestingly, it was
a law signed by Alabama's Republican governor earlier this year that may have played a role in that sizable black voter turnout.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law on Wednesday that could restore voting rights to thousands of felons, many of them African American, in a state where about 250,000 people are disenfranchised because of their criminal records….

The Definition of Moral Turpitude Act was passed by state lawmakers last week and signed by the governor, a Republican, on Wednesday afternoon, according to a spokeswoman from the governor’s office. The law creates a list of fewer than 50 crimes of moral turpitude, including murder, kidnapping, and sexual abuse—though notably, white-collar crimes such as public corruption are left off the list.

It is still unclear how many felons will be affected by the new measure—the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates it could be thousands, many of them African American, though Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill has suggested that fewer will be affected. In any case, by eliminating the gray area in the law, registrars in charge of the state’s voter rolls will now have clearer guidance while registering voters.

Fifteen percent of black residents in the state have been kept away from the polls because of their criminal records, according to the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a lawsuit last year arguing the state’s moral turpit ude rule was discriminatory. “Felony disenfranchisement laws have the undeniable effect of diminishing the political power of minority communities,” said Danielle Lang, an attorney for the center. Indeed, at the time of the state’s constitutional convention, the president of the convention said the rule was intended to “establish white supremacy” in the state.

We saw another large turnout of African-Americans in another former Confederate state that had big a Dem win in 2017- Virginia. And that state also restored the voting rights of some felons last year. This article in the Huffington Post discusses the case of LaVaughn Williams, a convicted felon who was released from prison 3 years ago and is now studying to be an auto mechanic. The article says Williams voted for the first time at age 55 in November's election for Governor and State House in Virginia.

“I now felt like a citizen. I now felt like I will make a difference in some kind of way. Just bubbling in them little circles, it’s like power, it’s power,” Williams said just after she voted, displaying two “I voted” stickers with American flags on her jacket. “If you had asked me maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I would’ve said, no, I didn’t never think I would vote.”

Votes from people like Williams on Tuesday were deeply significant because it marked a significant achievement by McAuliffe, who acted unilaterally to restore those rights to more than 168,000 former felons ― a policy Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the governor-elect, has said he is proud of and would continue.

Ed Gillespie, his Republican opponent, ran attack ads warning that restoring voting rights to former felons would make Virginia less safe. Republicans in Virginia have expressed little interest in continuing to aggressively restore the rights. Last year, the state GOP successfully challenged McAuliffe when he tried to give a blanket order restoring rights to former felons, and he has done so only on an individual basis since. The party also unsuccessfully pushed a constitutional amendment in the state legislature that would condition the restoration of rights on the payment of all fines and legal fees ― a measure critics likened to a poll tax.

In 2016, there were 508,680 potential voters in Virginia disenfranchised because of felonies, including more than one in every five African Americans, according to The Sentencing Project. The state’s disenfranchisement of felons extends back to the 1830s and was included in the state’s 1902 constitution as part of a set of voting restrictions intended to keep African Americans from voting.

The large black turnouts and Dem wins in Alabama and Virginia are the exact opposite of what we saw in Wisconsin in 2016, as lower turnout in Dem-voting cities with disproportionate amounts of minorities were a significant factor in Donald Trump winning the state by 2016 by 22,000 votes.



The ACLU has a map which shows what regulation various states have when it comes to voting rights for felons. As you can see, in Wisconsin felons cannot vote until they complete their post-prison probation, unlike many of the Midwestern states to our east, which allow felons to vote as soon as they done with their incarceration.



Wisconsin’s standard seems overly cruel, given that these individuals on parole and/or probation can be working, contributing members to society with most other rights of citizenship, if people can look past the felony conviction (owning a gun is a rare exception). But when it comes to voting, these people are still considered second-class citizens in the state. That prohibition is especially noteworthy given that Wisconsin had the highest percentage of African-American men in prison in the country in the 2010 Census, and it is logical that these voting restrictions would fall heavily on black people in the state.

Then add in the fact that Scott Walker and WisGOP have passed several other types of voter suppression that are clearly geared toward keeping black people from voting (something that they seem to have been successful in doing in 2016), and voting rights seems like an issue to HAMMER for 2018.

Looking ahead, it makes me wonder if African-Americans are as fired up to vote in Wisconsin in 2018 as they were in Alabama and Virginia in 2017, and does that mean GOPs have even less of a chance of winning in what already seems like a pro-Dem year? Or does it mean Governor Walker, US Senate candidate/ALEC Queen Leah Vukmir (who was reportedly “frothing at the mouth” to limit voting rights in 2011), and the rest of the Wisconsin GOP are just better than Alabama at keeping Dem-leaning groups from voting?

I think we need to ask our Walker, Vukmir, and the rest of the vote-suppressing ALEC crew at the Capitol why Wisconsin isn’t following the example of states like Virginia and Alabama, and restoring the voting rights of felons as soon as they are put back into society. If we want people to be “corrected” from their time in prison, don’t we want them to be rewarded with full rights and responsibilities outside, so it’s less worth it not to return to a life of crime?

I’d love to see the response from the race-baiting, election-rigging WisGOP slime as they try to talk their way out of that.