I canvassed for the Obama campaign with some friends on Saturday in Chester, New Hampshire, a suburb of Manchester. Canvassing can be a lot of unanswered doorbells, polite refusals, and devout Republicans, but as pieces in the Times and Post explained on Sunday, it’s a crucial element of Obama’s “ground game.” The promise of recent polls will only be realized if turnout is strong on Election Day.
Ambling through the streets of Chester, we encountered a man who said he wasn’t voting for Obama because he “doesn’t support terrorists.” That unfortunate brush with an inconceivably widespread sentiment was tempered by another man who described himself as a lifelong Republican voting for Obama. (He also offered to let us use his bathroom!) Still, at the end of our long day on the campaign trail, it wasn’t clear that we had convinced anyone of anything — except for one man, who made the whole trip worthwhile.
Early in the day, we approached the home of a 70-year-old woman who, according to the Obama campaign’s dossier, was registered as a Democrat. But before we could ring the doorbell, we met her son, who was mowing the lawn. He said his mother was sleeping but definitely voting for Obama, so we asked if he was planning to vote, too. “No, I can’t,” he said. “I’m a felon.”
He said it just like that, which was refreshingly, if jarringly, honest. And, hey, more than a million people are convicted of felonies each year, mostly for dubious drug offenses. So we expressed our sympathy and went on our way, but something seemed amiss. Whipping out my phone, I learned that in New Hampshire, felons are perfectly eligible to vote after leaving prison. So we returned and informed our friend, who was surprised but happily enfranchised. He told us, “Obama is my man.”
You can read all about felon disenfranchisement at the ACLU or the Sentencing Project, both of which are doing valuable work on the issue. Things are much better than you might imagine, or at least better than I had been lead to believe in a few sociology courses. In Kentucky, Viriginia, and, for all intents and purposes, Florida, felons are permanently barred from voting. Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, and Wyoming disenfranchise some but not all felons for life. But in the other 40 states and DC, felons can vote upon completion of their sentence. Some allow probationers and/or parolees to vote as well. And in Vermont and Maine, even prisoners can vote. Check out the encouraging map from the ACLU below.
Still, the Sentencing Project says (pdf) that 5.3 million Americans, including 12.5% of black males, are “prohibited from voting due to prior criminal behavior.” Who knows how many more felons, like the man we met yesterday, are free to vote but so relentlessly subjugated by the criminal justice system that they aren’t aware of the right?
