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Op-Ed Contributor

The Case for Allowing Felons to Vote

Credit...Eleanor Davis

In the 1870s, the woman’s suffrage movement claimed the right to vote by citing the new 14th Amendment’s promise that no state “shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

Their opponents didn’t see it that way. “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon,” The Rochester Union and Advertiser scoffed in an 1872 editorial.

But suffragists insisted. The right to vote, they argued, cannot be carved away from citizenship. “Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens?” Susan B. Anthony asked in an 1873 speech. Her answer: “It is not only one of them, but the one without which all the others are nothing.”

Anthony’s call remains unfulfilled today, as suppressive voting rules in nearly every state deny many Americans their voting rights. Six million otherwise eligible individuals are stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction, removing them from a key arena of public life.

But Anthony’s words are a reminder that the right to vote is a bedrock of our ability to govern ourselves democratically. While citizenship need not be a necessary condition for enfranchisement — for example, San Francisco has enabled noncitizens to vote in school board elections — it should be a sufficient one.

New Jersey, a state that trails most of its neighbors in terms of ensuring that all of its citizens have the right to vote, now has the opportunity to carry out such an unapologetic agenda of voting rights restoration.

Two Democratic state senators, Sandra Cunningham and Ron Rice, have said that they will introduce legislation for New Jersey to join Maine and Vermont as the only states with no felon disenfranchisement whatsoever. Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who campaigned on a pledge to strengthen voting rights, should champion this far-reaching proposal and help make New Jersey a model to emulate.

The rest of the country sure needs it. Twelve states bar felons from voting even after they have completed their sentences. In Florida, more than 10 percent of the voting-age population is stripped of a voice at the polls, according to a 2016 report from the Sentencing Project. Other states, like Mississippi and Kentucky, aren’t far behind.

These 12 states’ obscene levels of disenfranchisement have prompted nationwide efforts to restore the rights of former felons. They include a ballot initiative to this effect in Florida, executive orders by Terry McAuliffe when he was the governor of Virginia and calls for federal legislation. Such reforms are essential.

But we must also restore the rights of the millions of individuals who are still serving sentences. Forty-eight states disenfranchise people who are incarcerated; 34 disenfranchise people who are out of prison but are on parole or probation.

This means that in 16 states people who are on parole or probation can already vote. Those states includes places such as Indiana and Ohio. But they do not include purportedly progressive states like California, New Jersey and Washington, which have comparatively regressive disenfranchisement rules.

These states cannot be left off the hook for the hundreds of thousands of residents whom they disenfranchise. “The moment you deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government,” Anthony warned in 1873, “you degrade him from the status of a citizen of the republic to that of a subject,” a person “helpless, powerless, bound to obey laws made by superiors.” Allowing people to vote only after completing their sentences still strips many of a political voice and undermines democratic decision-making.

True, Anthony and her fellow suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton sought support for woman’s suffrage by distinguishing it from voting rights for “criminals.” Yet the principle underlying their advocacy — one that affirms the franchise as an unassailable element of citizenship — demands that everyone be allowed to vote.

The importance of not depriving any citizen of a voice in government becomes especially clear in light of the origins of felon disenfranchisement laws, which spread in the decades after the Civil War and have long been a central part of the arsenal with which states have tried to exclude African-Americans from politics.

Buoyed by the systematic racial biases of the criminal justice system — which mean black people are more likely to be arrested and are punished more harshly — the strategy has worked. Nationally, the disenfranchisement rate among black adults is three times that of the population as a whole.

New Jersey can lead the way in remedying this. Its disenfranchisement rate — 1.4 percent — is the highest in the Northeast after Delaware. Approximately 94,000 people (a large majority of whom are on probation) were disenfranchised as of 2016. That’s greater than the population of Trenton, the state capital.

This rate skyrockets among New Jersey’s African-Americans: 5.3 percent aren’t allowed to vote. In fact, half of all disenfranchised adults in New Jersey are African-American, even though just 13 percent of the state’s voting-age population is.

Governor Murphy has pledged to “open democracy up.” That demands that New Jersey — and the rest of the country — enfranchise all its citizens.

Daniel Nichanian is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in political science at the University of Chicago.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Case for Letting Felons Vote. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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