Advocacy Groups Deny Partisan Politics to Reclaim Ex-Felon Voter Rights
An intensive campaign to reclaim the right to vote for people with criminal pasts began Wednesday in New York. Some Republicans immediately branded it as an attempt by liberal advocacy groups to help Democrats in November’s historic presidential election.
Not so, said Donna Lieberman, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), one of the sponsors of the statewide effort to register more ex-felons and educate them and election officials on their rights, when I asked her for her opinion following Republican concerns of an effort that would register ex-felons to vote. “Every vote counts,” she said. (See Virginia Republican Todd Gilbert’s comments to the Washington Post in June 2008.)
“There is a mistaken belief that those with criminal records permanently lose their right to vote,” said Lieberman. “This campaign seeks to correct that mistake by educating both the public and county election officials that people who have completed felony sentences have the right to vote.”
About 122,018 New Yorkers and more than 5.3 million Americans are barred from voting in the United States because of felony convictions, according to the advocacy groups.
Ex-felon, ex-narcotics dealer Maria Perez, a 39-year old single mother of two boys and three girls from Coney Island, was denied the right to vote in the 2004 presidential elections, but now is a registered voter through the help of NYCLU.
The campaign will run until the 10 October voter registration deadline and will feature bus and train advertisements promoting voter literacy in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Buffalo.
Some disagree with the campaign. “This is a thinly veiled attempt to widen the Democratic Party’s voter base,” Corey F. MacDonald, a Republican prosecuting attorney from Portsmouth, N.H. told me. “Convicted criminals will generally not tend to cast their votes along with a party that advocates stiffer penalties for criminals.”
Perez, however, is undecided on who to vote for. Perez told me, at the moment, she is advocating for “the people that are on parole, that are finishing parole, that feel that they don’t have the right also – to come out and vote.”
One Republican voter, however, thinks this campaign effort will not make a difference in the November elections. “This is just noise – everything in an election year is,” Harvard University graduate student Jonathan Morav told me.
“Lyndon Johnson believed that the 1964 civil rights act would bring African Americans into the Democratic Party,” Morav said. “Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the 1990’s believed that comprehensive immigration reform would bring in more Hispanics.”
“In an election year, you go to where the votes are,” Morav said. “If you don’t find enough, you find ways to create them.”
Perez will be featured in a three-part series on YouTube as she votes for the first time in the November elections.
“[Perez] is the face of this issue and we’re hopeful that in this election and in every election moving forward, every individual has the right to vote even if they’ve been convicted of a crime in the past can exercise it,” said Lieberman.
What do you think? Is this a partisan issue or a civil rights issue?
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