So says the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand on Monday a Florida law that generally bars convicted felons from voting, even after they have completed their term of prison, probation and parole.

The high court rejected an appeal which argued that the law could be challenged under a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voter disqualification based on race.

Every state in the nation, except for Maine and Vermont, prohibit, to one degree or another, felons from voting. Fourteen states, including Florida, generally bar felons from voting even after they have served their sentences and have completed their terms of probation and parole.

Approximately 5 million felons who have been released from prison are legally disenfranchised, civil rights experts have estimated. About 1.4 million black men remain permanently disenfranchised.

The appeal to the Supreme Court involved eight Florida citizens who brought the class-action lawsuit on behalf of more than 613,000 Florida felons who are barred from voting even though they have completed their prison sentences and their terms of probation or parole.

Under the law, felons are barred from voting for life unless their civil rights have been restored by Florida's Clemency Board. Attorneys who challenged the law said that Florida, Alabama, Kentucky and Virginia were the only states that disenfranchise first-time offenders for life.

The lawsuit challenged the law, which was initially adopted in 1868 and revised 100 years later, for violating the Voting Rights Act and for disproportionately disenfranchising blacks.

Now we can question the wisdom of such laws, but not their constitutionality. It does not even take much legal scholarship to reach the result announced today. After all, one simply needs to go to the Fourteenth Amendment.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

In other words, the Constitution itself settles this matter, granting the states the right to impose such bans on felon voting. The solution, then, is in the legislatures of the sttes that impose such bans, not the courts.

Posted by: Greg at 12:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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