The movement to restore felon voting rights has heated up, with even some prominent conservatives joining the cause. Yet considerable opposition remains from the Right. One reason is the conventional wisdom that felons are mostly Democrats.
Most of the academic studies on the issue back that notion. However, only a handful of studies have been done on the question and even the authors of those concede that they have very little real-world data to draw on.
“There may be many things that we are not picking up about the felon population,” Jeff Manza, a sociology professor at New York University who has co-authored some of the most widely cited studies on the subject, told the Washington Examiner. “It could be we overestimated turnout.”
What studies have been done are estimates based on debatable assumptions or involve samples so small they likely aren’t representative. Data that would ordinarily be used, such as exit polling, isn’t available.
“Nobody has done a national survey of felons or prison inmates that would allow us to estimate that directly,” Manza said.
Activists echo that point. “We don’t know the leanings of people who have been disenfranchised because they’re not registered so they haven’t stated a party affiliation,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project.
Restoring voting rights has gained steam as an issue in recent years. Six states have rolled back prohibitions since 2009, most recently in Kentucky late last month under an executive order by outgoing Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear. An ACLU lawsuit against Iowa, expected to be resolved this summer, may force that state to roll back its prohibition.
Over the same period, South Carolina and Tennessee have strengthened their prohibitions against felon voting. Two states that did briefly roll back their voting restrictions, Florida and Iowa, subsequently restored them. A bill to loosen Maryland’s restrictions was vetoed in May by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.
While few say it out loud, the potential partisan impact is a key factor in those fights.
Jane Henderson, executive director of Maryland-based Communities United, which is pushing state lawmakers to override the veto, argues that Hogan was pressured by other Republicans not to hand Democrats an advantage.
“I think it cuts both ways,” Henderson added. “I think the Democratic leadership in the legislature probably support this because they see it as more Democratic voters.”
While many conservatives have taken up sentencing reform and some, like presidential candidates former Sen. Rick Santorum and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have endorsed restoring voting rights, others such as the coalition group Right on Crime remain wary.
“Some of our signatories have shared their own views on this. At this time, Right on Crime as an entity has not taken a position on the issue,” said Marc Levin, the group’s policy director.
Others remain dead-set against the idea. “When elected Democrats push to give felons the right to vote it is a perfectly rational and reasonable inference to say those Democrats understand that the overwhelmingly majority of violent criminals vote Democratic,” presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told ABC News on Dec. 2.
Cruz’s comment conflates all felons with violent criminals. However, Justice Department data shows that only one-third of all felony convictions involve violent crimes. None of the few studies on felon voting that have been done separated violent criminals from the rest.
The idea that felons lean heavily Democratic appears to have been established in a 2002 study Manza co-wrote with University of Minnesota professor Chris Uggen, titled, “Democratic Contraction? Political Consequences of Felon Disenfranchisement in the U.S.”
Their study estimated that felons would have voted between 2-1 to 4-1 Democratic in presidential elections between 1972 and 2000 and about 2-1 Democratic in Senate races over the same period. It said the total number of these disenfranchised voters was 4.7 million.
“Analysis shows that felon disenfranchisement played a decisive role in U.S. Senate elections in recent years. Moreover, at least one Republican presidential victory would have been reversed if former felons had been allowed to vote,” Manza and Uggen wrote.
Coming shortly after the heavily contested 2000 presidential election, in which the outcome in the key state of Florida hinged on just 537 votes, the study got heavy attention. Activist voting rights groups such as the Brennan Center for Justice and the Sentencing Project have often cited it.
But the study was not based on any surveys of felons. Instead, the authors used Census Bureau data to compare felons to regular voters with the same race, age, gender, income, education and employment status. It then assumed the felons would have voted the same way the non-felons did.
While he defends the study, Manza stresses, “These are statistical estimates that are subject to a variety of error. We caution everyone to treat them as what they are: Rough n’ ready estimates based on limited data.”
Marc Meredith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who also has studied the issue extensively, said the 2002 study was a “really useful starting point” but nevertheless made some questionable assumptions. For example, it predicted that felons would vote at higher rates than subsequent evidence has indicated.
“Ex-felons as a group are less civically engaged and have a lower sense of political [involvement] than demographically similar non-felons,” he said.
Meredith, in a 2014 study with Michael Morse, a research fellow at Stanford Law School, examined felon voting trends in three states that make the data public: New York, New Mexico and North Carolina.
In New York, felons registered 62 percent Democratic, 26 percent independent or third party, and 9 percent GOP. In New Mexico, the ratio was 52 percent Democratic, 29 percent independent/third party and 19 percent GOP. In North Carolina, it was 55 percent Democratic, 35 percent independent/third party and 10 percent GOP.
This study was cited by Cruz to back up his comments on violent criminals. But Meredith told the Washington Examiner that those three states were not a large enough sample to draw conclusions from.
“It would vary tremendously by state. It would depend a lot on the demographics of the ex-felon population,” Meredith said. The fact that so many felons register as independents or with third parties adds another question mark, he notes.
One major reason why felons are thought to lean Democratic is because African-Americans, who as a group vote about 9-1 Democratic, are overrepresented among that population.
However, African-Americans account for only 38 percent of all people with felony convictions, according to the Justice Department data. The majority – about 60 percent — are Caucasian and 90 percent of all felons are male. As a group, white males, especially low-income ones, lean Republican.
Another factor is that many felons already can vote, but don’t. Only 10 states permanently disenfranchise felons and eight of those only disenfranchise some, usually those convicted of violent crimes. In the other 40 states, the situation varies, with some allowed to vote once released from prison, while others cannot vote until they complete their parole or probation. In Maine and Vermont, prison inmates are allowed to vote.
Meredith and Morse’s study found that that 32 percent of New York felons eligible to register did so and only 19 percent cast a ballot. In New Mexico, the rate was 26 percent registered and 24 percent voting. In North Carolina, it was 41 percent and 33 percent. Nationally, voter participation rates were about 58 percent in 2012, a presidential election year.
Voting rights reform activists argue the problem is that too little is done to inform ex-offenders that they can vote or that the process to do it is too burdensome.
But in another a study by Meredith and Morse in which Iowa felons were contacted and told that they could legally register to vote, only about 15 percent followed through and voted. The share was 5 percent for those weren’t contacted.
