Of all the struggles facing the nation’s previously incarcerated convicted felons, restoring their rights to cast a ballot seems the least pressing. The fact that this aspect of reintegration into society can flow from a lawmaker’s pen stroke makes the temptation to pursue such a reform irresistible to the nation’s Democratic officeholders.
Calling it a civil rights issue and the end of a chapter in Virginia’s “long and sad history” of preventing African-Americans from exercising their voting rights, the Old Dominion State’s Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to hundreds of thousands of violent and nonviolent felons last week, even those who had never applied for restoration to the voter rolls. McAuliffe’s assertion suggests Democratic motives on this issue are as political as they are altruistic. It revealed that this was, in part, an extension of Democratic attempts on the left to cast any and every effort by Republicans to ensure the integrity of the vote as a vaguely racist endeavor designed to disenfranchise African-Americans, as well as to disadvantage Democratic candidates.
Predictably, local Virginia Republicans played to type. “The singular purpose of Terry McAuliffe’s governorship is to elect Hillary Clinton president of the United States,” said Virginia House Speaker William Howell. “This office has always been a steppingstone to a job in Hillary Clinton’s Cabinet.” Old Dominion Republicans have a point. The move came just days after the state General Assembly closed its 2016 session. In this transparent end-run around the legislature, McAuliffe disadvantaged Virginia’s voters by subverting the authority of their elected representatives. Shockingly, you don’t hear protests from the left about this form of disenfranchisement.
Still, Republicans who accuse McAuliffe of seeking to stack the deck for Clinton ahead of November are doing themselves and their party no favors. Virginia was just one of a handful of states that still deny voting rights to formerly convicted felons who had served their time and completed a period of supervised release. From 1996 to 2008, 28 states either restored or eased the process of restoring voting rights to former inmates who served their time. The restoration of voting rights is, in fact, one element of criminal justice reform measures that have attracted the support of a number of conservative lawmakers.
Republicans in Washington like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senators Mike Lee, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley support measures like the truncation of mandatory minimum sentencing to reduce the nation’s prison population. Republicans like Graham, John McCain, and Rand Paul have made it clear they believe it is only right to restore voting rights to criminals who have serviced their debt to society. Though the conservative activist and donor classes are split on the issue of restoring voting rights, some influential right-leaning organizations are foursquare behind it. “We’re big fans of people voting,” said Koch Industries General Counsel and Senior Vice President Mark Holden. “We think it’s important.”
There are Republicans who will say McAuliffe’s measure goes too far, exceeded his authority as governor, or was simply injudicious to pursue in a general election year. Those are perfectly valid criticisms. Republicans are, however, by no means united against the restoration of voting rights to the formerly incarcerated, and to go after McAuliffe’s reform on its merits advances a Democratic effort to cast the GOP as the party of disenfranchisement.
From the purging of voter rolls to ensure an accurate list of registered voters, to opposition to weeks of early and absentee voting, to antipathy toward universal voter registration; a variety of liberal efforts to increase the voting population are viewed unfavorably by Republicans. From a conservative perspective, the modest hurdles before aspiring voters – things like learning how to register and Googling the location of your polling place – are by no means prohibitive. In fact, they are the least a society can do to ensure a reasonably informed electorate. “Voting is the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is,” as National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote.
It is, however, voter identification laws that represent the equivalent of a new poll tax and the restoration of Jim Crow laws, according to the country’s more hysterical voices on the left (including Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton). The reality of voter ID is less clear-cut than agitators on the left allow.
The majority of statewide voter identification laws were only implemented after 2010, so there are really only two election cycles 2012 and 2014 that can be studied to measure their effects. To avoid an apples-to-oranges comparison between a midterm and presidential election year, they must be taken respectively.
“Fourteen of the 21 states had a voter ID requirement in place, while seven didn’t. If ID laws affected turnout in these states, it didn’t show up in the numbers: The average turnout rate for each group was 51 percent,” wrote former New York City Director of Public Affairs under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Francis Barry. In some states, like Georgia, African-American turnout in 2014 increased over 2006 and 2010. It is most likely the case that Georgia’s competitive gubernatorial and senatorial races in 2014 drove turnout.
On the presidential level, there is precisely one data point (2012) to measure its effects on minority voter participation. Forbes contributor Neil Assur’s study of census data and voter participation rates in 2008 and 2012 found that early voting restrictions dampen white voter participation more than they do for black or Hispanic voters. More intuitively, and to the extent they can be measured, the depressing effect of voter ID laws on voter participation among African-Americans seems to have been much less than it was for Hispanics – a population that is inflated by an influx of immigrants. “Criminal Restrictions and Voter Registration Restrictions, however, do not seem to have a significant impact on voter turnout,” he noted. As was the case in Georgia, competitive races drive turnout. Stated simply: voters vote when they have a compelling reason to do so.
All this may be beside the point. Progressives who declare the Republican Party’s exertions in the effort to ensure that only eligible voters cast their ballots are appealing to emotions. Republicans who attack McAuliffe’s motives rather than the process by which he secured his latest reform are only helping the left make their case. A Republican Party that elevates as its presidential nominee the candidate of large and militarized deportation forces, Muslim bans, and calls for the execution of five wrongly accused black youths in a full-page newspaper ad will be unable to repair its reputation among minority voters. In that scenario, the decimation the GOP will endure at the hands of minority voters will be entirely deserved. But most of what the left calls “disenfranchisement” cheapens the word. Republicans should not help Democrats in their dishonest effort to cast the GOP as the party of hostility toward minority voters by living down to their worst stereotypes.
