Urgency of Addressing Felony Disenfranchisement

Floor Speech

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Ms. SEWELL of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I rise on the first Restoration Tuesday of February to talk about the issue of felony disenfranchisement, an issue that is critical to voting rights in our country.

Felony disenfranchisement dates back to before the Jim Crow era. It is inconsistent with the values we cherish most in our country today and it contradicts the narrative that we've moved beyond the sins of our past. The United States should not be a country where past mistakes have endless consequences with no opportunity for second chances.

5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of these laws. 4.4 million are out of prison, living in our communities, paying taxes, working, and raising families, yet they remain unable to vote, shut out from our democracy.

Denying this right of citizenship further punishes individuals who re-enter our communities and counters the expectation that citizens have rehabilitated themselves following a conviction. The United States should not be a country where past mistakes have countless consequences with no opportunity for redress.

My home state of Alabama is one of 12 states that do not automatically restore voting rights to people who have served their sentences. Alabama has one of the nation's highest disenfranchisement rates. Nearly a third of African American men in my home state have permanently lost their right to vote. Regardless of the amount of time they've been out of prison, they have been completely excluded from the electoral process.

These state laws that bar 5.8 million Americans with felony convictions from voting date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the decades following passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, lawmakers across the country worked tirelessly to invalidate the black vote. As the Jim Crow era began to gain ground, these bans were strengthened.

While poll taxes and literacy tests were effective tools in their arsenal, statutes allowing the subjective and permanent exclusion of large numbers of minorities from the democratic process were a particularly potent weapon in their efforts to undermine African- American political power.

Those who championed these bans were clear on their intent. In 1901, disenfranchisement in Alabama was extended to all crimes involving ``moral turpitude''--applying to misdemeanors and even non-criminal acts. The president of the constitutional convention argued the state needed to avert what he called the ``menace of Negro domination.''

In 2016 we are still operating under some of the same laws that were cornerstones of Jim Crow. Our nation's existing patchwork of federal law disfranchising people with criminal records perpetuates entrenched racial and socioeconomic discrimination. We've clearly fallen woefully short of achieving our ideals. We can and must do better.

Rep. John Conyers has introduced a great piece of legislation to restore voting rights in federal elections to the millions of Americans who have been released from incarceration, but continue to be denied the right to vote. I encourage all of my colleagues, from both sides of the aisle, to support the Democracy Restoration Act of 2015, a bill to restore voting rights in federal elections to people who are out of prison and living in the community.

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