@wantolder said in Memphis BLM founder Pamela Moses sentenced to 6 years for illegally voting:
how is it constitutional for her to lose the right to vote?, how do they get represented in a party?
Each State has its own laws regarding Felons (generally, people convicted of a crime for which the punishment is more than a year in prison/jail) - losing, and sometimes having the ability to regain the right to vote. It's called "Felony Disenfranchisement"
My Trumpite friends will vehemently disagree with me, but facts are facts:
- Felony disenfranchisement was introduced in post Civil War era, and was originally almost entirely in the South. It was used primarily as a way to prevent blacks from voting. (The local Sheriff could arrest you for sweating too much, the local judge sentences you to a year in prison [making it a felony], but then decides to "commute the sentence" to "time served" - meaning the only REAL penalty was the loss of the right to vote!)
Many Liberals contend that the Nancy Reagan era "War on Drugs" was equally race-based - as only the drugs preferred by Blacks (cocaine), Caribbean/Latinos (marijuana), and Asians (heroin) were targeted. Drugs like alcohol and most kinds of pills - preferred by Whites - were "overlooked". But again, the goal was the same: use felony disenfranchisement to stop the minorities from voting.
I can't speak for all States, but my own State of Florida - acknowledged in the 1838 State Constitution's supplemental writings - enacted Felony Disenfranchisement for just that reason: to stop former Slaves from voting. They also tried many of the other "infamous" old-South "voter suppression tricks" - like poll taxes, citizenship and literacy tests, and segregated polling stations [Whites could vote in the City, but Blacks had to travel to the far reaches of the County to vote - and there were long lines and almost no staff present... indeed, often the ballots from these "remote" polling places were lost in transit back to the County Seat!] There was no need to hide your racism in the 1800's! Hell, for the first half of the 1900's either for that matter!
Anyway, that part of the State Constitution was repealed in a 2018 Constitutional Amendment by ballot initiative. It passed with 65% of the vote (well above the 60% threshold needed in the Florida Constitution for it to pass). The new law automatically gave felons who had completed their sentences their voting rights back.
But the "Rule of White Supremacy" still lives here in my great State of Florida: our Legislature (mostly White men, mind you) wrote a new law that says that these "ex-felons" ALSO had to pay off all fines, duties, fees, and restitution before they could regain the right to vote. Only thing is: MOST cases didn't enumerate these funds - so these ex-felons didn't know, and couldn't be told, how much they owed!
Now, a well-meaning, give-em-the-benefit-of-the-doubt person would say "well, they just didn't account for that - the Legislature will just have to fix that" - except that transcripts of floor debate reveals that they most certainly DID know (and expected) that MOST felons would not be able to pay - hell, not even know HOT MUCH to pay - those debts, and thus, the "intent of the Legislature" was to deny them the right to vote.... this was mentioned in a US Court of Appeals ruling that it was Constitutional (by the US Constitution) - because the State Legislature has the authority to determine what can disqualify someone from the right to vote, and if/when those rights can be restored.
It is estimated that about 1-million Floridians were disenfranchised by this end-around from what was pretty clearly the "will of the people" (the Constitutional Amendment by Referendum) in 2020. Barring something very unusual and unlikely, they will continue to be again in 2022.
Now a couple of points here:
- the assumption many people make is that a VAST MAJORITY of these ex-felons are Black or brown... that's not at all true. A majority are White! But the percentages do show a higher percentage of minorities than the general population. (In 2016, it was determined that 10.4% of the overall population in Florida was disenfranchised due to Felony Disenfranchisement. It also found that 23.3% of the Black population was disenfranchised in this way. [Source]
- the "assumption" many people make is that these would all be Democrat voters - and again, that's not true. Of the 750,000 or so ex-felons who registered (under a lower court order) for the 2020 election, about 30% registered Republican, and about 33% registered Democrat! (The rest registered as a minority party, or what Florida calls NPA - No Party Affiliation)
NOTE: Just today (Feb 7, 2022), another court ruling (this one on very narrow grounds) held that the Legislature was within its rights to restrict voting in this way. [Moral of the story: Felons are going to have to make their case in the Legislature, not the Courts - at least not the US Federal Courts!]
