Race and felonious voters (updated)

By Ed Lasky

There it goes again: The New York Times characterizes felon voting laws as Jim Crow-era. The Times wants readers to believe that laws that deny or restrict rights of felons to vote are a relic of Civil War oppression of blacks. Therefore, supporters of these laws are racists.

However, the basis of these laws is the principle that lawbreakers who are felons should not have a role to play in choosing who will make and enforce the laws that they have violated in the past. What is racist about that and why do opponents of these laws choose to depict these laws as being racist?

Aren't they showing their racism? This is a law and order issue that has been transformed into a race issue by Democrats for political purposes (presumably because most felons will vote for Democrats who have a soft approach towards criminals).

The ubiquity of this characterization can be simply shown by using the search terms "Jim Crow" and "felon voting" into google. This meme has becoming the de facto standard in describing the issue of felons' voting "rights."

Update from Ed Lasky:

One more aspect I should have mentioned is that the New York Times is revealing its biased views towards the South and Southerners. These felony voting restrictions exists outside of Florida and outside of the South. Would these laws be depicted as Jim-Crow era laws? The genesis for these laws was not race-based, as the Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar writes:

But the history of felon disfranchisement laws is, in fact, far more complex. Many states, north and south, passed such laws (or constitutional provisions authorizing such laws) long before the Civil War and for reasons that had little or nothing to do with race. Connecticut did so in 1818, for example, as did New Jersey and Wisconsin in the 1840s. In some southern states, moreover, felon disfranchisement provisions were first enacted not by the racist redeemer governments that came to power in the 1870s, but by their predecessors: the Republican governments that supported black voting rights. By 1900, felon disfranchisement laws were in place in a majority of states, with widely varying ethnic and racial compositions (including even Vermont!). (The data for all these assertions can be found in the appendices to my book, The Right to Vote.)

For additional information on the breadth of these sorts of laws one can also find information here. Many states have had these sorts of laws on their books for years-and one would probably be hard-pressed to have them characterized as being Jim-Crow era laws.

Richard Baehr adds:

If the felon ban was added in 68 to the Florida constitution, how is that during the Jim Crow era? Can the Times define the Jim Crow era? It is certainly not after passage of Johnson's civil rights act or voting rights act.