Felons being silenced at polls?

Jeff Benson

A UC graduate student claims ex-felons aren’t being notified of their

voting eligibility, and he said he’s got the research to back it up.

UC Irvine sociology student Matthew Cardinale conducted a survey

of 50 ex-felons to determine if ex-felons knew their voting rights

and how losing the right to vote has impacted their lives.

Cardinale found that half of the ex-felons surveyed, many of whom

were incarcerated for drug use or minor thefts, were not aware of

their voting eligibility status or even how they can regain the right

to vote. There isn’t a lengthy process required to regain that

eligibility, Cardinale said, all they have to do is reregister.

California law requires that felons complete their parole before

they’re allowed the right to vote, but while 40% of the people

Cardinale surveyed voted before their convictions, only one of the 29

eligible voters ever bothered to return to the polls.

“I asked them if they even knew if they had a right to vote or

not, and I found there was so much confusion,” he said. “Half of them

had an incorrect understanding and most of them thought they couldn’t

vote for their whole lives. All 50 states have different laws about

this. It’s what they call the ‘crazy quilt’ on the state level.”

Cardinale was so troubled by the results that he’s taken an

advocacy position, even if it means allowing prisoners to vote from

prison and during their paroles.

“Each state legislature should reinstitute the voting rights of

all citizens,” he argues. “It shouldn’t be in the state’s interest to

take away voting rights, whether you’re in prison or not ... The

purpose of prison is reintegration and reform. “

And ex-felon’s votes could also upset an election, Cardinale

found.

Nearly 70% of the 50 ex-felons he spoke with at the Union Rescue

Mission in Los Angeles said they’d vote left-wing.

UCI sociology professor and faculty advisor David Snow, who

assisted Cardinale with the project, said ex-felons should be made

more aware of their rights, because they’ve served their sentences

and deserve equal protection under the law.

“One can debate about the worthiness of the sanctions,” Snow said.

“Institutionalization is a sanction, as is parole. They violated the

law, and they’ve done their time.”

An estimated 5-million Americans are legally disenfranchised from

voting, because state law where they live prohibits them from doing

so, due to current or prior felony convictions, Cardinale said.

The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes

reduced reliance on incarceration and increased use of more effective

and humane alternatives to deal with crime, gave Cardinale and three

other researchers $2,500 grants to gather first-person testimony

based on voting habits of ex-felons.

Cardinale was not sure, however, how to track down ex-felons for

his survey. So, he went to the Union Rescue Mission, which allowed

him to access ex-felons there between August and September, he said.

They all happened to be homeless, and were each subsidized $10 for a

30-minute interview, he said.

Cardinale’s research was the first submitted back to the project.

He published his results in a journal for the Sentencing Project, a

national criminal justice policy advocate. He’s also planning to

formulate his research into his master’s thesis.

“I’ve been doing research focused on political participation and

political empowerment of disadvantaged groups,” he said. “I asked

questions about what issues they care about -- the availability of

affordable housing, health care, ending [the Three Strikes Law].

“There are already so many barriers, because they’re homeless, and

then on top of that, you take away their right to vote. So the first

study was to go to the felons and find out how they’re affected by

this.”

Snow, who’s researched and published a book on homelessness,

believes the nation’s prison system releases prisoners without the

connections that link them to the mainstream economy, allowing many

of them to end up on the streets without full knowledge of their

rights.

“Homelessness is overrepresented among veterans, among ex-cons and

among people who’ve lived in foster homes and group homes,” Snow

said. “Then they come from these holding institutions -- prisons --

and part of the problem we see coming from these facilities is that

these people are not given the skills to make do on the outside.”