Disenfranchisement

IT'S DIVINE JUSTICE, GORE IS TOLD

Drugs Policy Denied Vote To 2m Blacks

Al Gore may have lost America's presidential election not because of a
badly designed ballot, dubious counting practices in Florida or the
defection of independents to Ralph Nader, but because of the criminal
justice policy he and Bill Clinton have pursued for the past eight years.

That policy appears to have robbed the Democrats of victory by
disenfranchising nearly one in three black men in Florida, most of whose
votes he would have received.

Figures published yesterday show that 92% of black voters in the south
backed Mr Gore, compared with 7% per cent for George W Bush, in last
Tuesday's election. Elsewhere in the US, Mr Gore led Mr Bush by 85% to 12%
among black men and 94% to 6% among black women.

A total of 4.2m Americans were not allowed to vote last Tuesday because
they were in prison or had felony convictions. Of those, more than one
third, or around 1.8m, were black, according to the Sentencing Project, a
Washington-based group that researches and campaigns on the issue.
Nationally, this amounts to 13% of all black men.

The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based organisation that campaigns for
alternatives to jail, and Human Rights Watch examined the extent of
disenfranchisement in 1998 and discovered that in two states, Florida and
Alabama, 31% of all black men were permanently disenfranchised because of
convictions, many for non-violent offences. In five other states, including
the marginal states of Iowa and New Mexico, one in four black men were
permanently disenfranchised, and in Texas one in five black men could not
vote. Only Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts allow those jailed for felonies
to vote.

"In a stroke of divine justice, it turns out he [Gore] might have easily
won Florida had it not been for the felony disenfranchisement laws that
disproportionately strip the vote from African-American men," said Sanho
Tree, director of the drug policy project of the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington. "Let's hope he ponders this long and hard while he
waits for the recount."

The Clinton-Gore administration has been heavily criticised by penal
reformers for its "war on drugs" which has led to more than 400,000 people
being jailed, a disproportionate number being black and Latino.

Only the states of Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts allow those convicted
of felonies to vote.

Cedric Muhammad, editor of the blackelectorate.com website, writes in his
latest bulletin: "If he [Gore] and his supporters are honest, they may have
to blame the Clinton-Gore administration and a criminal justice system that
locked up blacks wholesale over the last eight years for non-violent
offences.

"Because 13% of all black men [nationally] cannot vote because of
incarceration and past felony convictions, and because this presidential
election is so close, it may well be true that blacks who have served their
time in prison and gone on to lead productive and reformed lives could have
provided the margin of victory for Al Gore and Democrats if they were
allowed to vote."

Attempts to extend voting rights to ex-offenders have been stalled for more
than a year by the House of Representatives' judiciary committee, and some
see the disenfranchisement as a subtle form of denying the vote to a
substantial part of the black community.

Whether or not the Democrats examine this issue as a result of the
closeness of the election, they will certainly accept that they have to pay
their dues to Jesse Jackson and other leading African-Americans for
mobilising the black vote so successfully. The Rev Jackson and the local
unions played a key part in Mr Gore's victory in the vital state of
Pennsylvania, and it was notable during the final days of the campaign that
the Gore team relied increasingly on the organisational skills of the black
churches.

President Clinton chose mainly black audiences and venues for his pro-Gore
electioneering.

It was noticeable after the first televised presidential debate that one of
the first people Mr Gore embraced was the Rev Jackson. His son, Jesse
Jackson Jnr, a Democratic party congressman from Chicago, also played a
major part in trying to persuade the left not to stray to Mr Nader. The
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, meanwhile,
spent £4.9m on advertising, mailings, telephone calls and leafletting in an
attempt to get the black vote out.