“My own mother said, ‘Why are you wearing that? Are you crazy?’” Glasgow, now a pastor and criminal-justice organizer, told MTV News. He told his mother, “No, it proves I’m a citizen.”
Like Glasgow, Michael Hiser has held on to his voting swag; he cast a ballot for the first time in 2016, after receiving a full pardon for 53 drug and theft convictions in 2015 in Kentucky, and still keeps his “I Voted” button next to his bed so he can look at it before he prays.
Barbara Harris in Virginia got the paperwork in the mail saying her rights were restored on August 25, 2016, a date she can recite like a grandchild’s birthday. Seeing that envelope in the mail, she says, “felt like I had gotten married and had a baby at the same day.” June 13 will mark the first time she’s been able to vote in more than a decade, due to her drug conviction and the two years she spent in prison. She carries the document in a briefcase, along with all the other materials she needs to apply for a pardon.
Before they received that treasured proof of their rights, Glasgow, Hiser, and Harris were just three of about 6.1 million Americans stripped of their right to vote by felon disenfranchisement laws. As Harry Enten pointed out at the Guardian a few years ago, keeping ex-felons from voting has had a far bigger impact on elections than voter ID laws, though the latter issue gets much more national attention. These laws disproportionately affect minorities; 1 in 13 black Americans can’t vote because of felon disenfranchisement. This number is large enough to potentially change the outcome of elections, the makeup of districts, and the amount of attention elected officials give to all of their constituents.
“Say you have 100 people in one town, 100 people in another” in a state with particularly extreme felon disenfranchisement measures, Julie Ebenstein, an attorney with the ACLU, told MTV News. If one town has a population with no felony convictions while the other has 50, “to a politician, that town is only worth 50 votes. You can assume [these towns are] going to get a lot less attention from political campaigns, and it’s less likely their concerns will be heard.” And, as many organizers noted, ex-offenders are paying taxes, despite their inability to vote. “Our country,” says Hiser, “is famous for going to war over that.”
Laws chipping away at the voting rights of the incarcerated first appeared after Reconstruction, joining the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and other tactics intended to deprive minorities of the ballot. After the Civil War, law enforcement in the South was quick to arrest black citizens who were enfranchised in order to create a new form of nearly free labor, leaving behind upticks in incarceration and a repeated loss of voting rights. Many of these measures are still kicking; as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, has pointed out, more black Americans were barred from voting in 2004 because of felon disenfranchisement measures than in 1870. The number of disenfranchised minorities in and out of prisons ballooned across the country once the drug war hit in the ’70s and ’80s. Given the Trump administration’s repeated threats to bring back a punitive battle against drugs — despite the noted lack of successof the last offensive — organizers are especially driven to try to tackle these measures.