Wednesday, February 6, 2008

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and The Ordinary People's Society (TOPS) are working in Alabama this year to restore the ability to vote to 250,000 people with felony convictions. Alabama is one of a handful of states where people's voting rights are not restored once their sentences are complete.

Alabama's voting rights situation is particularly outrageous for people convicted of nonviolent, low-level drug crimes. Under the Alabama Constitution, these people never lose their right to vote, even while they are in jail or prison -- but current state policy does not actually let them vote. That means that 70,000 Alabamians convicted of low-level drug offenses, who are actually eligible voters, are denied the ability to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed voting right.

DPA and TOPS are advocating for a system to recognize the distinction between those who lose their right to vote and those who do not, so that people are not unconstitutionally denied the ability to vote. The Reverend Kenneth Glasgow, executive director of TOPS, said in an op-ed in The Birmingham News this week, "After visiting jails and prisons throughout the state and registering thousands of voters, I can tell you these people are not being notified of their voting rights, nor is there a system in place that allows them to exercise those rights."

DPA is also working with TOPS to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences and paid their debt to society. 

Gabriel Sayegh, director of DPA's State Organizing and Policy Project, said, "Felony disfranchisement is bad enough on its own. But the problem is even worse in Alabama, because people who never lost their voting rights—but are incarcerated under the failed drug war—are being denied access to the ballot during one of the most important election cycles in our nation’s history. The war on drugs is an extension of Jim Crow, and as Rev. Glasgow says, is the pressing civil rights issue of our day.”