(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

This election season, untold numbers of eligible voters are at serious risk of being denied access to the polls. Are unfair and unnecessary voter ID laws to blame? Is it because their houses are under foreclosure and their registrations are being challenged? Yes. But there’s more: the poor administration of felony and misdemeanor disfranchisement laws across the country.

Approximately 5.3 million Americans with criminal records are barred, by law, from casting votes. The immoral and undemocratic nature of these disfranchisement laws aside—Brent Staples has a nice treatment of this issue on his blog—their implementation has led to widespread confusion about who is eligible to vote and when. A new report by the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice documents the chronic lack of knowledge about these laws among the very people charged with administering them: state elections officials. To add insult to injury, another new report by the ACLU finds that the vast majority of voter registration forms fail to adequately explain state disfranchisement provisions.

The consequence is the mass dissemination of inaccurate information, leading to the de facto disfranchisement of qualified voters. The number of people potentially affected by this problem jumps sharply, as a result, from 5.3 million to 47 million—the number of Americans with criminal records. (Yes, one in six Americans has some sort of criminal record—makes you think differently about what it means to be a "criminal," doesn’t it?) Even people without criminal records have the potential to be affected by confusing information, as the voter registration report shows.

This mass confusion is as predictable as it is disturbing. Disfranchisement laws vary widely across the country and are often quite complex, specifying different treatment for people convicted of felonies versus misdemeanors, those with first felony convictions versus multiple felony convictions, individuals with in-state versus out-of-state convictions, people on probation versus parole, etc. Even I have a hard time keeping track of all the different provisions.

So what’s the solution? Well, there is a desperate and immediate need for education. Education of elections and criminal justice officials, who should be trained to understand fully their respective state laws and answer questions from voters. Education of people with criminal records, who should receive information about their eligibility to vote when under, and being discharged from, supervision. And education of the public, who should be able to easily access clear and comprehensive information about eligibility through a variety of media platforms.

Or we could just eliminate these laws.

(Originally posted on Pam’s House Blend).

Isn’t the right to vote freely for a candidate of your choosing just that: the right to vote freely for a candidate of your choosing?

Not according to one Virginia legislator, who seemed to forget the whole principle of small "d" democracy when he characterized efforts to educate people with felony convictions about their right to vote as a big "D" Democratic conspiracy. "I don’ t know a lot of young Republicans who end up being felons," C. Todd Gilbert told The Washington Post. "Clearly the groups that are soliciting these felons to get their rights restored are predisposed to be in support of Obama, and I am sure this registration effort is designed to help their candidate."

(By way of background, a patchwork of state felony disfranchisement laws, inconsistent from state to state, prevent a whopping 5.3 million Americans with past felony—and, in seven states, misdemeanor—convictions from voting. More are disfranchised by general confusion about and elections officials’ misapplication of these laws.)

Even if we indulge the Gilberts of the world momentarily, all we have to do is scratch the surface to see that plenty of Republicans have helped reform their states’ disfranchisement policies in favor of greater enfranchisement. (Not to mention the fact that people of all political persuasions go to prison; just check out this New York Times interview with people incarcerated in Maine and Vermont.)

Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal just signed a bill that requires the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to notify people leaving its custody about voting rights restoration and to provide them with a voter registration form. Jindal is in good company. It was Florida’s Republican Governor Charlie Crist who revised his state’s antiquated law last year to ease voter restoration for some people with nonviolent felony convictions. And George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, signed a bill eliminating the state’s two-year waiting period before voting rights could be restored.

These distinguished gentlemen are joined in their support of increased access to the polls for this population by Jack Kemp (former Congressman and Republican Vice-Presidential candidate) and Chuck Colson (Nixon’s former Chief Counsel), and no one questions their Republican cred. In fact, a diverse array of organizations has spoken in favor of greater enfranchisement, including the American Probation and Parole Association, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Correctional Association.

Felony disfranchisement’s nasty roots in voter suppression should remind us that promoting access to the polls for all eligible voters is fundamental to the health of our democracy. Following the Civil War, Southern states faced the enfranchisement of large African-American populations as a result of the 15th Amendment; in response, they scrambled to maintain white rule by, among other things, enacting or reforming felony disfranchisement laws in order to curtail African-Americans’ access to the polls.

Mississippi, for example, revised its constitution to impose disfranchisement as a penalty only for the crimes of which African-Americans were most frequently convicted. When Virginia’s disfranchisement laws were debated at the state’s 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, one delegate argued that felon disfranchisement would "eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county…will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of the government."

Over 100 years later, felony disfranchisement laws remain in effect and continue to restrict the political power of communities of color and individuals of all stripes. This is not a partisan issue, it’s a democracy issue. The Washington Post, Boston Globe and Roanoke Times agree. See, C. Todd Gilbert? The right to vote is something we can all get behind.

Lawsuits certainly have a knack for bringing people-and information-out of the woodworks.

In March, the ACLU Racial Justice Program and ACLU of Georgia filed a lawsuit against the Atlanta Independent School System (AISS) and Community Education Partners (CEP), the for-profit company contracted since 2002 to run AISS’s disciplinary alternative school to the tune of almost $7 million a year. The lawsuit accuses the school-whose motto, if you can believe it, is ‘Be Here, Behave, Be Learning’-of violating students’ constitutional rights to an adequate public education, to be free from unreasonable searches, and to due process when referred to and disciplined at the school. Just some of the fun facts in the case include students being subject to pat-down searches on a daily basis, a prohibition on bringing anything into or out of the school (including keys, combs, pencils, paper, tampons and books), a no homework policy, and a police officer who slammed an innocent student’s head into the wall hard enough that his mother-who was not notified of the incident by the school-had to take him to the hospital.

The AISS-CEP school is yet another example of the school-to-prison pipeline, a national phenomenon that funnels youth of color out of classrooms and into prisons (or prison-like schools) by treating them as dangerous criminals in need of containment rather than students worthy of instruction. The school is also, as a new article by Creative Loafing (Atlanta’s alternative weekly) explains, a product of Republican educational policy, which has favored discipline, privatization, and test-based accountability. CEP’s success, the article suggests, is due not to its capacity to educate youth, but to its ability to use its political ties to win contracts from Texas to Florida to Philadelphia. It should come as no surprise, then, that CEP’s contract in Atlanta was renewed until 2009 shortly after CEP leadership made campaign contributions to four individuals running for the Atlanta Board of Education.

Since the ACLU filed its lawsuit, CEP’s failure to educate students has become a hot topic, and people familiar with the school-from parents to former administrators-have begun to speak out. In addition to the Creative Loafing story, the Atlanta Journal Constitution has published three articles (available here, here and here), NPR covered the issue, the Atlanta Voice and Atlanta Progressive News both ran stories, and a post appeared on Daily Kos. Let’s hope the media spotlight continues to show who is truly misbehaving.

In late March, Georgia’s Columbus-Muscogee County Elections & Registration Office mailed out upwards of 700 letters informing voters they had become ineligible to vote because they had been convicted of felonies. The problem? A potentially large number of them hadn’t been.

As in 47 other states across the nation, Georgia disqualifies otherwise-eligible voters who are convicted of felonies, a practice known as felony disfranchisement. Officially, this practice - which traces its ancestry to post-Civil War attempts by southern states to limit the political participation of newly-enfranchised African-Americans - has led to the disfranchisement of over 5.3 million Americans. In practice, however, its implications are much broader, extending to voters like those in Muscogee County who are erroneously disqualified by elections officials struggling to implement complex disfranchisement policies.

As the Ledger-Enquirer reported, Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel’s office recently began using a computer program to determine which voters must be disqualified due to felony convictions,comparing information received from the county courts with information in the Georgia Department of Corrections and statewide voter registration databases. This process generated far more names than it should have, including many voters whose names - but not necessarily other information - matched those of people with felony convictions. The list that went to Muscogee County was over-inclusive as a result, but the county nevertheless sent form letters to a majority of those individuals on the list, thus mistakenly purging hundreds of voters from the rolls.

The confusion is, no doubt, compounded by Georgia’s flawed and vague felony disfranchisement policy: Georgia law disfranchises people convicted of felonies involving “moral turpitude,” but no list of crimes that meets this definition exists.

This violation of the fundamental right to vote for as many as 700 Muscogee County voters - not to mention voters in other counties who may have been subject to the same errors - might remind you of similarly flawed “purges” of eligible voters in Florida and elsewhere in important election years. This issue must be taken seriously and remedied properly. Secretary of State Handel has advised citizens who receive the letter in error to call her office to correct it, but - as the ACLU noted in a letter to Secretary Handel yesterday - the burden should be on her to act affirmatively to correct her mistake and ensure that it is not repeated.

Voting is the bedrock of our democracy, but as long as felony disfranchisement exists, American voters will be vulnerable to these kinds of purges.

To learn more about the ACLU’s work to end felony disfranchisement, visit www.aclu.org/righttovote.

Equal opportunity foes were dealt a blow last Friday when the proponents of an anti-affirmative action initiative in Oklahoma filed a motion to withdraw their own proposal, stating that the measure likely did not have enough valid signatures to make it onto the ballot.

Proponents of the so-called Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative (OKCRI)-backed by millionaire California businessman Ward Connerly and his so-called American Civil Rights Institute-were put on the defensive when local civil rights advocates, in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, began looking into the OKCRI’s fishy signature-gathering process earlier this year.

Connerly and his cronies have a history of using devious tactics to thwart the democratic process. Their strategy to deceive voters through misleading ballot language and signature-gathering practices got them in hot water in federal court in Michigan, and voters in Colorado have accused the ACRI of lying about the intent of a current initiative. As a result, civil rights groups have been watching Connerly’s associates closely in Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona and Missouri, where they are using the same dirty tricks to place similar initiatives on the ballot this fall.

In Oklahoma, after reviewing the signatures submitted in favor of the OKCRI, the Secretary of State identified an unprecedented number of serious irregularities, including numerous duplicate names and addresses and instances of petitioners signing their own signature sheets multiple times. Faced with a legal challenge to the signatures by the ACLU and NAACP LDF, OKCRI proponents moved to withdraw the initiative altogether, stating that they do not want to ‘waste [the] Court’s efforts nor taxpayer money…when [they] are reasonably certain that [the initiative] will fail to garner to requisite number of signatures.’

Given that these initiatives rely on deception to garner support, it’s no surprise that a serious investigation has the proponents running scared. Voters in each state where equal opportunity is under attack must hold Connerly and his allies accountable and ensure that the truth is brought to light.

To learn more about the importance of affirmative action, visit www.aclu.org/racialjustice/aa. For information about the ACLU’s work on women’s rights, visit www.aclu.org/womenshistory.

-By Ana Weibgen and Nicole Kief