IN ALABAMA, A FIGHT TO REGAIN VOTING RIGHTS SOME FELONS NEVER LOST

DOTHAN, Ala. -- The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, onetime criminal and
founder of a ministry called The Ordinary People Society, spent years
helping people with criminal records regain the right to vote in
Alabama, where an estimated 250,000 people are prohibited from voting
because of past criminal activity.

Then he discovered that many of them had never actually lost the right.

Because of a quirk in its Constitution, Alabama disqualifies from
voting only those who have committed a "felony involving moral
turpitude." Those who have committed other felonies -- like marijuana
possession or drunken driving -- can cast ballots even if they are
still in prison, according to the state attorney general.

But it has been slow work cajoling public officials to enforce and
publicize the law. Until Friday, the secretary of state's Web site
advised, incorrectly, that those with any kind of felony conviction
could not register unless they had served their time and their right
to vote had been restored by the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Because neither the Legislature nor the attorney general has offered
a definitive list of crimes involving moral turpitude, there is no
way of knowing how many inmates are eligible to vote. But state
agencies generally agree that those convicted of drug possession --
at least 3,000 of Alabama's 29,000 prison inmates and thousands more
on probation -- are eligible. Most felons and former felons, however,
assume that they have lost the right to vote.

"This is an issue that's never come up before," said Richard F.
Allen, the commissioner of corrections. "I would think that if there
were any latent feeling out there that they wanted to vote, they
would have expressed it by now."

Mr. Glasgow, who is the half-brother of a far less obscure crusader
based in New York, the Rev. Al Sharpton, believes that not only do
inmates and former convicts want to vote, but also that their ballots
could alter the political landscape in this Republican-leaning state,
adding that his group has registered more than 500 people by visiting
a handful of county jails.

"There would be a lot of difference in our legislators, our elected
officials and our presidents that we've had," he said. "It would
definitely change the political spectrum of Alabama."

Republicans agree. They railed against a statute passed in 2003 that
made it easier for some former felons to regain their voting rights
by side-stepping a lengthy and backlogged pardon process.

"There's no more anti-Republican bill than this," said Marty Connors,
the chairman of the state Republican Party, according to news reports
at the time. "As frank as I can be, we're opposed to it because
felons don't tend to vote Republican."

In the two years after the 2003 statute took effect, more than 5,500
former felons had their rights restored, and interest in the November
presidential election is running high, said Sarah Still, manager of
the pardons department. In January, Ms. Still received more than 280
applications for voting rights, up from an average of 140 a month last fall.

Nationally, 5.3 million people are barred from voting because of
their criminal history, according to a 2004 estimate cited by the
Sentencing Project, a criminal justice policy group. In the last
decade, as criminals who were swept into prison during the drug war
have been released and the difficulty of re-integrating them into
society has become clear, at least 16 states have made it easier for
former felons to vote.

But in the South, where restrictions on former convicts are among the
most severe and in many cases date to Jim Crow laws, there have been
fewer changes. Last Monday the American Civil Liberties Union filed
suit in protest of a 2006 Tennessee law that requires former convicts
to pay back child support before regaining the right to vote. In
Alabama, the Republican attorney general, Troy King, has proposed a
constitutional amendment that would delete the moral turpitude
clause, prohibiting all felons from voting.

Though he is an active Democrat, Mr. Glasgow, 42, says his main goal
is not to aid his party but to help former inmates become productive
members of society.

But for most of his own life he was hardly an exemplar of civic
engagement. Mr. Sharpton, in his memoir, "Go and Tell Pharaoh," says
his parents' marriage was wrecked when his father, Al Sharpton Sr.,
had an affair with his mother's teenage daughter from a previous
marriage, resulting in the birth of Kenneth.

By the time Kenneth was a teenager, his mother had taken him to her
hometown, Dothan, Ala., where he began to get in trouble for selling
drugs, became addicted to crack cocaine and did time in Alabama and
Florida for armed robbery and other crimes.

It was during his longest stint in prison, nine years, that the genes
of activism and oratory that run in Mr. Glasgow's family emerged and
he began to preach. When he was released in 2001, the bondsman who
had repeatedly bailed him out of jail became treasurer of The
Ordinary People Society and paid for Mr. Glasgow to attend seminary.

Mr. Glasgow opened a soup kitchen, held church services under a white
tent and began to help former convicts like Anna Reynolds, a
recovering addict, regain the right to vote -- a process often made
onerous by the moral-turpitude clause.

As a legal concept, moral turpitude refers to conduct that would be
immoral even if it were not illegal, unlike, say, speeding. The
delegates to the 1901 constitutional convention who used the term
also took away voting rights for other infractions that they believed
blacks were more likely to commit, like wife beating, adultery and
vagrancy. In 1985 the United States Supreme Court struck down most of
the law on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory, but the
moral-turpitude clause remained.

Most officials in Alabama were unaware of the clause until 2005, when
it came to light after a man on probation tried to vote in St. Clair
County. The parole board requested clarification, and the attorney
general responded with an incomplete categorization of felonies based
largely on previous court decisions.

The opinion leaves a large gray area, said Ms. Still of the pardons
department. It says, for example, that rape is a crime of moral
turpitude and that assault is not, but offers no clarification on
variations like statutory rape or assault with intent to kill.

The parole board settled on a policy of treating drug possession and
drunk driving as crimes devoid of moral turpitude, but that has not
put an end to the confusion, Mr. Glasgow said.

Initially Ms. Reynolds, 52, was told by the local registrar that she
could not vote because of a conviction for drug possession. She
applied to the parole board, which told her that it could not restore
her right to vote because she had never lost it. Finally, The
Ordinary People Society helped cut through the red tape.

On Feb. 5, Ms. Reynolds stood outside the public library handing out
sample ballots before casting her own. "Voting, that's part of
getting back to normal life," she said. "I've been out of the loop
for a long time, and it was good to have help getting back into the loop."