The Shame of Not Letting Felons Vote

Later this month the United Nations Human Rights Committee will conduct a review to determine whether the U.S. is complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which we ratified (with conditions) in 1992. If past is prologue, we can expect the U.N. Human Rights Committee to chide the U.S. for failing to live up to the covenant. In particular, the committee will probably hammer us for voting restrictions placed on convicted felons.

In advance of the review, a coalition of civil rights advocacy groups, including the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Sentencing Project, have released a report highlighting the fact that the U.S. is home to one of the largest conviction-related disenfranchised populations in the world. In 1980, 1.17 million adults in the U.S. faced some type of voting restriction due to a criminal conviction. By 2010, that number had increased 500 percent to 5.85 million people. As the Sentencing Project notes, that increase directly mirrors the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. And just as mass incarceration has had a disproportionate impact on people of color, so too do felon disenfranchisement laws: