Should convicted felons be allowed to vote? Answering that question is quite simple, as The Columbian has repeatedly editorialized: If you’re behind bars, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you’re no longer incarcerated, you should be allowed to vote.
Washington state’s Legislature took a step in that direction last year, passing a law that allows convicted felons to re-register to vote once they’re no longer on parole or probation. No longer can outstanding court-ordered fines or restitution keep a felon from voting. That stance angered many citizens, who mistakenly portrayed it as a soft-on-crime maneuver.
But as we have editorialized, allowing a felon to reclaim the right to vote when he or she is no longer behind bars is an excellent incentive for quickly rejoining society and starting a new life. And debt never blocks other voters from voting. Why should it obstruct felons once they leave jail? The old system, in fact, penalized the poor because wealthy felons could more quickly regain voting rights. (The new law allows voting rights to be revoked if a felon willingly fails to make regular payments on court debts).
On Tuesday, however, there arose a misguided, unwarranted effort to extend voting freedom to felons. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote in Washington state. That’s clearly the wrong approach and a blatant violation of the behind-bars, no-vote principle. Fortunately, state Attorney General Rob McKenna announced on Wednesday that the state will appeal the ruling.
Although the 9th Circuit’s ruling is flawed and likely to be overturned, it was not all that surprising, considering the source. The 9th Circuit — which covers nine Western states and is headquartered in San Francisco — has a long track record of strange rulings that often are overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. As Vanderbilt Law School professor Brian T. Fitzpatrick wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2007, “It is no coincidence that, when you hear about a bizarre ruling issued by a federal court of appeals, it very likely came from the 9th Circuit … As long as the 9th Circuit stays as large as it is … it is likely to continue being disproportionately reversed by the Supreme Court.”
In this case, two judges — A. Wallace Tashima and Stephen Reinhardt — in a three-judge panel cited the racial imbalance of Washington state prisons (37 percent of those incarcerated are of minority races) as a reason to extend voting rights to those behind bars.
The current system, they ruled, violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But they ignored the fact that three other appellate courts (in Massachusetts, New York and Florida) have ruled in favor of denying voting rights to those who are incarcerated. As Judge Margaret McKeown of the 9th Circuit wrote in dissent, her two colleagues “charted territory that none of our sister circuits has dared to explore.”
Across the land, Americans seem to agree. Only two states (Maine and Vermont) extend voting rights to those behind bars. Secretary of State Sam Reed correctly noted in a written statement: “We certainly support racial equality and efforts to make our criminal justice system free of bias. But we also support our state constitutional ban on voting by felons who are under Department of Corrections supervision.”
All of these factors lead us to confidently predict that the 9th Circuit’s strange and erroneous ruling will never survive scrutiny of subsequent judicial review.
