German Lopez · Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 1:18 pm
The criminal justice system will prevent more than 6.1 million people from voting in 2016.
In Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, more than 20 percent of the voting-age black population will be legally banned from voting this November.
That estimate comes from a new report by the Sentencing Project, which looked at the effect of felony disenfranchisement laws on Americans’ voting rights.
The report estimated that more than 6.1 million Americans will be unable to vote in the 2016 election. That’s about 2.5 percent of the overall voting-age population, and it includes more than 7.4 percent of the black voting-age population.
According to the report, the people currently in prison make up less than a fourth of the disenfranchised. The rest are living in their communities, barred from voting due to past felonies or still serving parole or probation for their crimes — “meaning that about 4.7 million adults who live, work, and pay taxes in their communities are banned from voting,” the Sentencing Project noted.
The report found that the number of disenfranchised voters keeps going up as more and more people are engulfed by the criminal justice system. In 1976, nearly 1.2 million people were disenfranchised. In 1996, more than 3.3 million were. And in 2010, nearly 5.9 million were. To put those numbers in context, the US population has increased by about 50 percent since 1976 — yet the number of disenfranchised Americans has more than quintupled since then.
The effect is unequal by race: As the number of disenfranchised Americans continues climbing, black adults suffer a brunt of the consequences as they’re disproportionately policed, arrested, and incarcerated. “Whereas only 9 states disenfranchised at least 5 percent of their African American adult citizens in 1980,” the report found, “23 states do so today.”
Read more
http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/10/11/13233460/felon-disenfranchisement-election-2016
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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