Hans von Spakovsky again demonstrates his commitment to ensuring every American has the right to vote by...penning an op-ed urging Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia not to re-enfranchise ex-felons before he leaves office:
Virginia felons who want their civil rights restored must show that they have paid their debt and that they've changed their ways. They cannot apply for restoration until they have been released from supervised probation for three years for nonviolent crimes or five years for violent, drug, or election-related crimes. They also must have paid all court costs, fines, and restitution to their victims.
Ex-felons pay their debt to society through their prison terms. Continuing to punish them after the fact is not only unnecessary, it has presumably zero value as a deterrent. The Sentencing Project estimates that 1 million of the disenfranchised were sentenced to mere probation.
Felony disenfranchisement laws have an incredibly disproportionate effect on minorities, around 13 percent of black men in America, or 1.4 million people, are ineligible to vote because of such laws, and the effect is even more pronounced depending on the region. In Florida and Alabama for example, nearly a third of black men are disenfranchised by these laws. Felony disenfranchisement is Jim Crow by other means, a policy that is colorblind on paper but in practice mostly affects nonwhites.
So if you're Hans von Spakovsky, the kind of guy who's spent his career making it harder for people of color to vote because they tend to vote for Democrats, felony disenfranchisement sounds like a pretty good deal. We also get a sense of von Spakovsky's priorities: This is a man who is angry that the Justice Department didn't pursue the New Black Panther case, an incident in which no actual voters from the precinct came forward to say they were intimidated. But punishing millions of people after the fact for crimes they've already served prison or probation terms for? Von Spakovsky doesn't see a problem.
This is a guy the Bush administration thought should be in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
-- A. Serwer
