As Ta-Nehisi (and others like Kendzior) have been saying - voter suppression and gerrymandering will be the problem
Ben JacobsVerified account
@Bencjacobs
Too poor to vote: how Alabama’s ‘new poll tax’ bars thousands of people from voting
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/04/alabama-voting-poll-tax?CMP=share_btn_tw
‘Poll tax in extreme’
Alabama’s felon disenfranchisement policies are probably unconstitutional, and they have disparate impacts on felons who are poor, black, or both, according to experts.
In 1964, the 24th amendment abolished the poll tax, but to this day in Alabama, money keeps thousands of people away from the ballot box. According to the Sentencing Project, a Washington DC-based criminal justice reform non-profit, there are 286,266 disenfranchised felons in Alabama, or 7.62% of the state’s voting-age population.
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More than half of those disenfranchised felons are black, despite the fact that African Americans made up only 26.8% of the state’s population as of July 2016, according to a US census estimate.
A new state law has cleared the way for people convicted of certain felonies to eventually regain the right to vote. But before that can happen, anyone who has lost the franchise in Alabama for any reason must first fulfill any financial obligations to the state and to their victims, according to the Alabama secretary of state, John Merrill.
“In order for you to have your voting rights restored, you have to make sure all your fines and restitution have been paid,” Merrill said in a phone interview last month.
Researchers with the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard and Yale universities crunched reams of Alabama court records and data from the past two decades for a study published in June in the Journal of Legal Studies.
The research paper states that “a majority of all ex-felons in Alabama – white, black, or otherwise – cannot vote because of a debt they owe to the state.”
Scott Douglas, executive director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, said such widespread disenfranchisement amounts to “the poll tax in extreme”, and that it has a detrimental impact on the democratic process in Alabama.
“I think it’s absolutely horrific. It’s a financial burden to voting, and once again, against people who are least able to pay it. It’s like a poll tax. It’s a barrier to voting. It’s a voting suppression tactic,” he said.
“Rich people can buy the right to vote. Poor people can’t.”