Tag: disenfranchisement
Why Ex-Offenders — And Prisoners Too — Should Have Voting Rights

Why Ex-Offenders — And Prisoners Too — Should Have Voting Rights

The Democratic primary race bumped into voting rights for incarcerated people again this week at a CNN Town Hall. Bernie’s on board, Mayor Pete’s a hard no, and both Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren said the idea warrants further “conversation” in the future.

Since it’s Second Chance Month, the annual awareness month dedicated to the stories and challenges of people who are leaving correctional custody, I think we should talk about it now. I want to discuss civic participation as a rehabilitation strategy and voting rights for prisoners as a way to keep people from reoffending.

When we talk about reentry, we think about the structural barriers like employment, housing, identification cards.

These are legitimate challenges for the returning citizen. As many as 27 percent of people released from prison are unemployed despite a cushy job market. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. Even what seems like an easy hurdle to clear — securing an ID card to start the job and housing search — can be next to impossible.

Because social service agencies are so focused on helping people over those hurdles, we miss opportunities to talk about the fact that so much of reentry is emotional and psychological; the biggest barrier is self-concept. A criminal record ostracizes a person relentlessly.

Disenfranchisement is an extension of the criminal label and reinforces the idea that a person will continue to live outside the law. This might explain why people released from prison in states that permanently disenfranchise people — such as Iowa and Kentucky — are roughly 10 percent more likely to reoffend than those released in states that restore their rights, according to one study.

Our memories are short when it comes to voting rights. We’ve forgotten the success story out of Florida years ago. Back when Governor Charlie Crist was in office, from 2007 to 2011, 155,315 offenders had their rights restored. Less than one percent of the re-enfranchised citizens reoffended. It was an unprecedented reduction in recidivism — until the next governor took the rights away.

Voting is collective decision-making; when enfranchised, people see themselves as stakeholders in society, custodians of their communities. So, of course, they’re less likely to break the law.

If voting rights can curb recidivism, then states such as Vermont and Maine, which already allow prisoners to vote, should have rates much lower than other states that permanently disenfranchise people, but they don’t (Vermont houses many inmates out of state, which complicates things).

The reason why “Franchise for all” hasn’t produced the anti-crime effects it promises is that people are confused about whether they can vote. The patchwork of rights across states enables a faulty message that no person with a felony record can cast a ballot. It’s not true. Some can, and some can’t.

And that’s the problem. As many as 17 million people with felony records are eligible to vote but may not know it, so they end up disenfranchising themselves. A study published in Probation Journal found that 68 percent of respondents with criminal records in California didn’t know they were eligible to vote there, which explains why we haven’t seen the public safety payoff to voting rights that we would expect.

Because there isn’t one law on voting rights, an insufficient number of incarcerated people and ex-offenders get the memo that they’re included in society, even in places where they are. Consequently, they miss that boost to self-esteem that being part of the electorate can have on a person.

Misinformation is the enemy here. The way to combat it is to establish one rule on voting, namely that any United States citizen over age 18 can vote, regardless of their conviction history or status as an inmate. The remaining 48 states that don’t allow prisoners to vote should reverse course and agree with Vermont and Maine to not strip anyone of their voting rights. With less confusion will come more voting — and less crime.

We haven’t paid enough attention to the public safety benefits of voting rights for all people, including inmates. Anyone who believes in safe communities as well as second chances should support prisoners’ voting rights.

To find out more about Chandra Bozelko and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

In Battleground Florida, Tough Stance On Felons May Sap Votes For Democrats

In Battleground Florida, Tough Stance On Felons May Sap Votes For Democrats

By Letitia Stein

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) – Leonard “Roscoe” Newton has been in and out of Florida’s prisons since before he could vote, starting with a youthful conviction for burglary.

He’s been a free man for six years now with an important exception: he still can’t vote.

Newton, who is African American, is among nearly 1.5 million former felons who have been stripped of their right to vote in a state with a history of deciding U.S. presidential elections, sometimes by razor-thin margins of just a few hundred votes.

Felons have been disenfranchised in Florida since 1868, although they can seek clemency to restore their voting rights.

Since 2011, however, when Republican state leaders toughened the restrictions on felon voting rights, just 2,339 ex-felons have had that right restored, the lowest annual numbers in nearly two decades, according to state data reviewed by Reuters.

That compares with more than 155,000 in the prior four years under reforms introduced by Governor Rick Scott’s predecessor, moderate Republican governor Charlie Crist, the data shows. Crist, who was governor from 2007 to 2011, made it much easier to restore ex-felons’ voting rights.

“When I tried to be an effective member of the community, I saw that I was voiceless,” said Newton, whose expectations of getting his rights restored were dashed when the rules changed under a new administration. “I’m 45, and I have never voted.”

The dramatic slowdown has stoked a racially charged debate over whether political bias taints the process of restoring felon voting rights in the largest battleground state in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Florida’s toughened ban means racial minorities are disproportionately excluded from voting because of higher incarceration rates, data shows. Black voters tend to favor Democrats.

“Republicans oppose the felon vote change because they are concerned about the political implications,” said Darryl Paulson, a conservative Republican voting rights expert who sees wide restoration of voting rights as “a huge political advantage for the Democratic Party.” Paulson says non-violent ex-felons should have the right to vote.

Almost all U.S. states deny incarcerated felons the right to vote but many restore those rights after they have completed their sentences.

Over the last two decades, more than 20 states have taken action to help people with criminal convictions regain their voting rights. Since July, Virginia’s governor has restored voting rights to 67,000 felons.

Florida is the largest of four remaining states that strip all former felons of voting rights, accounting for nearly half of those barred from voting nationally. Along with Virginia, the others are Kentucky and Iowa.

TOUGH NEW MEASURES

In March 2011, two months after he became governor, Scott reversed Crist’s reforms, which had allowed many non-violent felons to automatically get their voting rights reinstated after they had completed their sentences. Crist had also simplified the process for felons convicted of more serious crimes to regain their votes.

Scott, a millionaire former health care executive, put in place new restrictions, requiring ex-felons to wait for five to seven years before applying to regain the right to vote, serve on a jury or hold elected office. He said the new rules ensured ex-felons had proven they were unlikely to offend.

Florida has disenfranchised about one in five voting-age black voters, according to research collected by the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group.

That compares with about 8.6 percent of the state’s non-black potential voters. Data on the Hispanic voting-age population who can’t vote because of the law was unavailable, although Hispanics make up 12.5 percent of Florida’s inmates.

The rates reflect racial disparities in criminal convictions. Florida’s current prison population is nearly 48 percent black, more than any other racial group, although blacks are only 17 percent of the state’s population.

Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, which includes the capital city of Tallahassee, accused the Republican administration of repealing the felon voting reforms “to reduce the number of African Americans who had their rights restored because those voters were perceived to be more Democratic voting and so therefore were targeted for elimination.”

Sancho is a former Democrat who is now unaffiliated with either party.

Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Republican officials who drove the 2011 policy changes, did not agree to be interviewed by Reuters or respond directly to questions on the accusations that the law is intended to influence elections. But Bondi has previously denied the policy amounts to racially motivated disenfranchisement.

“For those who may suggest that these rule changes have anything to do with race, these assertions are completely unfounded. Justice has nothing to do with race,” Bondi wrote in a 2011 newspaper editorial.

Scott’s office, in a statement to Reuters, said former felons need to “demonstrate that they can live a life free of crime, show a willingness to request to have their rights restored and show restitution to the victims of their crimes” in order to have their voting rights restored.

“FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG”

Democrats have seized on the issue as a civil rights concern, regardless of the political impact, said Nell Toensmann, who chairs the Democratic Party of St. Johns County, a north Florida region of about 225,000 people dominated by Republicans.

“Yes, it does disenfranchise a lot of African Americans, but it disenfranchises a lot of white people who would be voting as Republicans as well,” she said.

The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation polling project shows a tight race in Florida. It estimates that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a 48 percent chance of winning the state, compared to her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s 42 percent.

Political scientists say the voting ban can sap votes from both parties, but some research suggests that Democrats pay a steeper price.

An analysis of voting patterns by race and economic status found that if the ban had not existed during the 2000 presidential election, Democrats would have had enough votes to overturn Republican George W. Bush’s 537-vote victory in Florida that won him the White House.

“In very close elections won by Republican candidates, felon disenfranchisement could be decisive,” said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota professor who led the study.

“IF I DENY, IT’S OVER”

Applying for voting rights can be difficult. Ex-felons must submit certified court documentation of each felony conviction — documents that can be difficult to secure for those unable to spend time and money tracking down records in courthouses.

Cases involving serious crimes are heard in person by a clemency board consisting of the governor and Florida’s cabinet officers, in quarterly meetings in Tallahassee.

During a Sept. 21 meeting in a windowless room in the Florida Capitol building, 48 petitions to restore voting rights were on the agenda presented to the governor and three state officers in an all-day session punctuated by tears and emotional pleas. Some petitioners were represented by attorneys, others showed up solo or accompanied by a friend or relative.

“Clemency is an act of mercy. There is no right or guarantee,” Scott told them, urging applicants to accept culpability.

State rules give him the deciding vote.

“If I deny, it’s over,” he said.

Learlean Rahming approached the podium in a black and white flowered dress, accompanied by her adult daughter. State records show dozens of criminal charges over two decades that include larceny, drug possession and shoplifting.

“I accept my responsibility for all of my stupid mistakes of the past,” said the 63-year-old woman, who had traveled from Miami, adding that she has been out of prison for more than 20 years.

Officials were impressed by her turnaround story, until Bondi noticed a discrepancy. Records showed Rahming had voted under a married name after her release. “Just to see if I could vote,” she told the panel, explaining that for many years she had not realized that her rights were taken away.

Scott moved to deny. Rahming left, wiping tears. The board ultimately cleared 23 residents to get back their civil rights. More than 10,500 applications are still pending.

Crist, the former governor who championed leniency, switched to the Democratic Party in 2012. In an interview, he questioned whether the policy changes on felons voting cost him a 2014 bid to reclaim the governor’s mansion.

He lost by about 64,000 votes – in the ballpark of the number of people in the state who complete felony sentences in a typical year, Florida Department of Corrections data shows.

“We will never know for sure,” Crist said.

Photo: Leonard “Roscoe” Newton, 45, who lost his right to vote in Florida before he was old enough to cast a ballot is pictured in Tallahassee, Florida, U.S. on September 20, 2016. Picture taken on September 20, 2016.  REUTERS/Letitia Stein

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.

The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.

Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

We’ve made some progress since then, but we still likely lose hundreds of thousands of votes every election year due to poor ballot design and instructions. In 2008 and 2010 alone, almost half a million people did not have their votes counted due to mistakes filling out the ballot. Bad ballot design also contributes to long lines on election day. And the effects are not the same for all people: the disenfranchised are disproportionately poor, minority, elderly and disabled.

In the predominantly African American city of East St. Louis, the race for United States senator in 2008 was missing a header that specified the type or level of government (Federal, Congressional, Legislative, etc). Almost 10 percent of East St. Louis voters did not have their vote counted for U.S. Senate, compared to the state average of 4.4 percent.Merely adding a header could have solved the problem. Below you can see the original ballot and the Brennan Center redesign.

“When we design things in a way that doesn’t work for all voters, we degrade the quality of democracy,” said Whitney Quesenbery, a ballot expert and co-director of the Center for Civic Design, an organization that uses design to ensure voters vote the way they want to on Election Day.

Many mistakes can be avoided with tiny tweaks.

Designer Marcia Lausen, who directs the School of Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote a whole book about how democracy can be improved with design. She even tackles the infamous butterfly ballot. The 2000 Chicago Cook County judicial retention ballot crammed 73 candidates into 10 pages of a butterfly layout punch card ballot, with punch holes packed much more tightly together than in previous elections. As in Palm Beach, Yes/No votes for the candidates on the left page were confusingly interlaced with Yes/No votes for the right page.

Lausen’s proposed redesign eliminates the interlaced Yes/No votes, introduces a more legible typeface, uses shading and outlines to connect names and Yes/No’s with the appropriate punch holes, and removes redundant language.

BEFORE

AFTER

In the 2002 midterm election in Illinois’ Hamilton County, each column of candidate names was next to a series of incomplete arrows. Voters were supposed to indicate their choice of candidate by completing the arrow on the left of the candidate name. But because we read left to right and the candidate names in two races lined up perfectly, many voters marked the arrow to the right. As presented in a Brennan Center analysis, setting the columns a bit further apart and adding borders would have cleared up this confusion:

                       BEFORE                                                                        AFTER

In Minnesota in 2008, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for the U.S. Senate seat by a sliver, less than 300 votes. In that race, almost 4,000 absentee ballots were not counted because the envelope was not signed. The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office decided to redesign the mailing envelope. After a series of usability tests, they added a big X to mark where people should sign. In the following election in 2010, the rate of missing signatures dropped to 837. Below is the before and after from a Brennan Center report:

Minnesota’s mailing envelope is a good example of how designers can solve design problems well before any election actually happens — by testing those ballots beforehand.

“Test and test and test,” recommends Don Norman, a designer and cognitive scientist who wrote the the book on designing objects for everyday life. The most important aspect of ballot design, he says, is considering the needs of the voters. He suggests doing extensive testing of ballots on a sample of people, which should include those who are “blind, deaf, or people with physical disabilities as well as people with language difficulties.”

Bad instructions are a design problem, too.

Beyond layout and ordering, the unanimous winner for worst part of ballot design? Instructions.

“The instructions are uniformly horrible!” said usability expert Dana Chisnell, who co-directs the Center for Civic Design with Quesenbery. Confusing jargon, run-on sentences, old-fashioned language left over from 100 years ago: all of these plague ballots across the country. Here are a few example instructions (the first from Kansas, the second from Ohio) along with the Brennan Center’s redesign:

BEFORE

AFTER

(Brennan Center, Better Ballots)

BEFORE

AFTER

Even if the instructions are clear, placement of instructions has a huge effect on whether people understand them. In usability tests conducted in Florida’s Sarasota and Duval counties in 2008, the majority of participants got to the end of the ballot and stopped. Which was a problem, because the ballot continued on the other side. Despite instructions specifically telling people to vote both sides of the ballot, they didn’t.

So designers added three words to the end of the right column: Turn Ballot Over. The result? An estimated 28,000 fewer lost votes in the two counties that adopted the redesign. Here’s the before and after:

Designers have already put together guidelines for making better ballots.

Luckily, there are resources for how to help avoid these predictable problems. In addition to Lausen’s book, the Design for Democracy initiative has worked for years at applying design principles to improve elections. A few years ago the design association AIGAcombined forces with Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell to condense their best practices into a set of handy field guides.

The ballot-specific guide, Designing Usable Ballots, has this advice:

  1. Use lowercase letters.
  2. Avoid centered type.
  3. Use big enough type.
  4. Pick one sans-serif font.
  5. Support process and navigation.
  6. Use clear, simple language.
  7. Use accurate instructional illustrations.
  8. Use informational icons (only).
  9. Use contrast and color to support meaning.
  10. Show what’s most important.

For the designers, these recommendations may seem obvious. But election officials — the ones responsible for laying out a ballot — are not designers.

Sometimes, reality thwarts good design.

Even if officials wanted to follow every design best practice, they probably wouldn’t be able to.

That’s because ballots are as complicated as the elections they represent. Elections in the U.S. are determined at the local level, and so each ballot must be uniquely crafted to its own jurisdiction. Ballots must combine federal, state, and local contests, display measures and propositions, and sometime require voters to express their choices in various formats — for example ranking their choices versus selecting one candidate for the job.

“There will always be special circumstances that present new problems for ballot design,” said David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has written extensively on voting behavior and ballot design.

Take what happened this summer in California’s Senate race primary. A record number of 34 candidates were running to replace incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer, and the ballot needed to fit them all. In many counties, elections officials simply couldn’t follow the good design recommendation of “Put all candidate names in one column.”

To make matters worse, bad design is written right into the law.

Election officials are often constricted in what they can and can’t do by specific language in their local election code. More often than not, the law is to blame for bad design.

For example, numerous jurisdictions require that candidate names and titles be written in capital letters. This goes against huge amounts of evidence that lowercase letters are easier to read. Other requirements like setting a specific font size, making sections bold or center-aligning headers make it next to impossible to follow all the design best practices. Illinois Election Code used to require candidate names to be printed in capital letters. (Statutes of the State of Illinois)

Some election code requirements just seem to invite clutter. In Kansas, a candidate’s hometown must be listed under their name. In California, the candidate’s occupation. Designers argue that this additional text complicates the ballot with needless information, but they can’t get rid of it without breaking the law.

“It’s amazing how many design prescriptions are written into law by non-designers,” said designer Drew Davies, who has worked with numerous jurisdictions to improve their ballots and voting materials and is design director of AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Some of those prescriptions border on the comical. In New York, election law requiresthat each candidate name must be preceded by “the image of a closed fist with index finger extended pointing to the party or independent row.” Here’s how that actually looks on real New York ballots:

In design, everything matters — even the order of the candidate names.

Some design problems are not as obvious as a pointing finger. Take something as simple as the order of the candidates’ names. There is a well known advantage for being listed first on the ballot. The “primacy effect” can significantly sway elections, especially in smaller races not widely covered in the media where there is no incumbent. One study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York found that in seven races the advantage from being listed first was bigger than the margin of victory. In other words, if the runner-up candidates in those races had been listed first on the ballot, they likely would have won.

As one report puts it, “a non-negligible portion of local governmental policies are likely being set by individuals elected only because of their ballot position.” To combat this unconscious bias, some states have already mandated that names are randomly ordered on the ballot. Still, many states and jurisdictions do not have a standard system for organizing these names.

The future will bring new design challenges… but also new ways to make voting more accessible.

As more and more states adopt absentee and vote-by-mail systems, they make voting more accessible and convenient — but they also introduce new ways of making mistakes. And those errors are only caught after the ballot has been mailed in, too late to change. A polling place acts as a fail-safe, giving you the opportunity to ask a poll worker for help or letting you fill out a new ballot if yours gets rejected by the voting machine. But on an absentee ballot, if you made a mistake and your vote isn’t counted, you’ll never know.

There are several current efforts to overhaul the ballot entirely. Los Angeles County, for example, has teamed up with the design company IDEO to create an easier and more accessible way to vote. Their customizable device would let people fill out a sample ballot on their own time from a computer or mobile device, and then scan a code at the polling place to automatically transfer their choices to a real ballot.

The Anywhere Ballot is another open-source project that’s designed to create a better voting experience for everyone — including voters with low literacy or mild cognitive issues. Their digital ballot template, which came out of extensive user testing and follows all the current ballot design best practices, lets anyone use their own electronic device to mark a ballot.

But of course, the design problems that plague ballots affect all aspects of the voting process.

Voter registration materials, mailed voter guides and education booklets, election department websites and online instructions, poll worker materials — all of these have problems that can be improved with better design.

“Ballots are where all the drama happens,” said designer Lausen, “but there is much more to election design.”

Cover Photo: (AP Photo/Gary I. Rothstein)

Virginia Governor’s Bid To Restore Felon Voting Rights Advances

Virginia Governor’s Bid To Restore Felon Voting Rights Advances

(Reuters) – The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Republican bid to have Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe held in contempt for his continued effort to restore voting rights to about 206,000 felons.

The high court said it would not require McAuliffe to prove that he is complying with its July 22 ruling that struck down his initial blanket attempt to restore felons’ voting rights.

The one-page order also said justices would not let Republican legislative leaders seek more documents through a discovery process.

McAuliffe’s efforts to restore voting rights to felons is seen as a possible aid in tipping Virginia, a swing state in the Nov. 8 presidential election, toward Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Opinion polls show her leading Republican candidate Donald Trump in the state.

Republican legislative leaders this month filed a contempt motion against McAuliffe. It came after McAuliffe said he had restored voting rights to almost 13,000 felons on a case-by-case basis after the state Supreme Court blocked his blanket clemency effort.

In a statement, McAuliffe said he was pleased by the court’s decision. “Restoring these Virginians’ civil rights is morally the right thing to do,” he said.

McAuliffe has said his original order would move Virginia away from lifetime disenfranchisement that hits African-Americans particularly hard.

Many of the convicts who benefited were African-Americans or Latinos, two groups that have voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in the past. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, won Virginia in 2012 and 2008.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Photo: Terry McAuliffe stands onstage during a campaign rally in Dale City, Virginia, October 27, 2013.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo