By Haider Rizvi
WASHINGTON, Oct 30 1996 (IPS)

Scott Outterson, 28, wants to cast his vote in next Tuesday’s U.S. presidential elections, but he will not be allowed to do so.

When he left a Florida jail two years ago, he thought he was free to enjoy all his fundamental rights as a citizen. He soon learned, however, that he had lost his right to vote.

“I don’t understand this at all,” he said as he watched the presidential candidates in a television debate recently. “Whatever crime I had committed, I have already been punished for.”

He is not the only one. Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens will be forced to stay at home when the polls open Nov. 5. Their plight is the same as Outterson’s: they were imprisoned at some point in their lives. While many states guarantee them the right to vote, others do not.

A U.S. Department of Justice survey reveals that in as many as 12 states, ex-prisoners continue to face denial of the right to vote — a major cause of concern in civil rights advocacy circles.

“This is a great way to disenfranchise a large number of people” says Steve Hawkins of the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). “It’s against the spirit of the U.S. constitution.”

But while the U.S. Constitution states that “the rights of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, sex, or previous condition of servitude”, it is silent on the issue of voting rights for former offenders.

Civil rights activists who are demanding repeal of such laws argue that states have no justification to keep formerly convicted citizens from exercising their right to work and to choose government leaders.

“When they pay their taxes, part of which goes to presidential campaigns, how could you deny them the right to vote?”asks Hawkins. “This is absurd.”

In some states, those convicted of a crime are not only deprived of the right to vote, but also the right to serve on a jury and hold public office.

In a number of states — including Florida, New Mexico, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming, Iowa, Alabama, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and Nevada — an ex-prisoners may regain the right to vote if the state governor grants a pardon.

But the process of seeking a pardon is so complicated that most former prisoners do not even bother to try obtaining one. And in most cases, if the crime was a federal offence, the ex-prisoners are ineligible for pardons anyway.

Hawkins complains that some ex-prisoners will never vote throughout their lives.

Civil rights groups describe these laws as deliberate attempts to disenfranchise minorities groups. They note that one-third of all prisoners in U.S. federal and state jails are African American men.

“It’s discriminatory,”says Jenni Gainsborough of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), one of the oldest civil rights advocacy groups in the United States. “Because a majority of the people who are negatively affected by such laws are either African or Latin Americans.”

The activists complain that it is difficult to effectively challenge the state laws on a national level.

“We have to deal with this issue on a state-to-state basis, which is really hard,” says Gainsborough.

Activists say ex-prisoners are not only denied their civil rights but are also socially and economically isolated from the mainstream of society, with offenders unlikely to get jobs after completion of their jail terms.

“Employers don’t accept them,” says Jack King of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). “States don’t recognise their due civil rights. So, they end up being in jails again and again.”

Prisoners’ rights advocates point out that the laws restricting the voting rights of former offenders are left-overs from British colonial rule.

“These things (laws) are old and traditional,” says King. “I don’t know if there is any rationale for not restoring the voting rights of an ex-offender who has already re-established himself as a productive member of society.”

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