Parfois jamais! Cinq millions de personnes seront privées du droit de vote en novembre l'an prochain. Beau retour sur les volets juridique, politique et historique. La question raciale n'est jamais bien loin des débats... Vous remarquerez une fois de plus la grande disparité entre les états sur une question qui concerne un vote au plan fédéral. Décentralisation...
"States vary widely on when they restore voting rights after a conviction. Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise people with convictions; even prisoners may vote there. People with felony convictions in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia are disenfranchised for life, unless they are granted clemency by the governor. The rest of the country falls somewhere in between.
These laws trace their roots through the troubled history of American race relations. In the late 1800s criminal disenfranchisement laws spread as part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – that ended slavery, granted equal citizenship to freed slaves and prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Criminal disenfranchisement laws followed in their wake. They were employed right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests as part of an organized effort to design supposedly race neutral laws that were in fact intentional barriers to African-American voting. According to historian Alexander Keyssar’s “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, between 1865 and 1900,” 27 states enacted laws restricting the voting rights of people with criminal convictions.
Historical records memorializing state constitutional conventions reveal some astounding rhetoric in support of these laws. During the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901, delegate Carter Glass (later a prominent senator, the Glass of the Glass-Steagall Act) described the suffrage proposal which included felony disenfranchisement as a plan that would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.” The strategy was not limited to southern states. In New York, African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, New York delegate Samuel Young implored: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom it is now proposed to clothe with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
When states enacted criminal disenfranchisement laws, they also expanded their criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed targeted recently freed slaves. In an 1896 decision, Ratliff v. Beale, the Mississippi Supreme Court confirmed that the new state constitution narrowed the disenfranchisement provision to target certain crimes such as theft, perjury, forgery and bigamy of which blacks were then more often convicted."
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/who-gets-to-vote/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1
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