With this year’s critical elections looming, there’s a good chance a majority of voting-age Oklahomans will not even cast a ballot. Four years ago, barely half of Oklahoma’s eligible voters – 52.4 percent – voted for president, the third-lowest turnout rate in the nation and the state’s lowest turnout in decades.
There are many reasons why Oklahomans fail to cast a ballot, from lack of interest in politics to scheduling conflicts and transportation challenges. But over 50,000 Oklahomans don’t vote because they are ineligible due to having been convicted of a crime.
As the population under criminal justice supervision has increased in recent decades because of tougher sentencing laws and the “War on Drugs,” the number of people disenfranchised across the U.S. due to a felony conviction has escalated dramatically. There were an estimated 1.17 million people disenfranchised in 1976, 3.34 million in 1996, and over 5.85 million in 2010, according to a 2012 report by the Sentencing Project.
Nationally, 2.5 percent of the U.S. voting-age population – 1 of every 40 adults – is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction. For African-Americans, the disenfranchisement rate is 7.7 percent, more than four times higher than for the non-African-American population. In Oklahoma, about 1.8 percent of the total population and 6.6 percent of African-Americans are unable to vote due to felon disenfranchisement, according to 2010 estimates.
State laws vary widely as to the voting rights of those with a felony conviction. A few states impose a lifetime voting ban on anyone convicted of a felony. At the other extreme, two states – Maine and Vermont – allow felons to vote even while serving time in prison. In Oklahoma, as in most states, felons are prohibited from voting both while they are in prison and after their release while serving probation or parole.
A dozen states restore the franchise to former inmates on probation or parole. If Oklahoma were to follow their lead, almost half of those now disenfranchised because of a felony conviction would have their voting rights restored.
There are compelling reasons to allow people released from prison to vote. If our goal is to encourage ex-offenders to reintegrate into society and contribute to their communities, they should be given the chance to exercise their most basic right of citizen participation.
David Blatt is executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, http://okpolicy.org.